Stopping by The LUV'NV today is the Otherborn blog tour, organized by Xpresso Book Tours.
We got to read and review and ARC of this Young Adult Dystopia, and you can enter to win one of five eBook copies of the book!
We got to read and review and ARC of this Young Adult Dystopia, and you can enter to win one of five eBook copies of the book!
Otherborn
by Anna Silver
Book #1 of Otherborn series
Publication: April 4th 2013 by Sapphire Star Publishing
Genre: Young Adult Dystopia
Genre: Young Adult Dystopia
Book Depository Amazon B & N Goodreads
London and her teenage friends live in a reprocessed world.
Confined within Capital City’s concrete walls, London has done the impossible and the illegal. She’s created something New- a song. But her mentor, club owner Pauly, is not impressed. Since the historic Energy Crisis forced everyone behind walls generations ago, the Tycoons have ensured there is truly nothing new allowed under the sun. Pauly warns London to keep her song to herself, if she knows what’s good for her.
What he doesn’t know is that London is keeping an even bigger secret: she dreams. And she’s not alone. London’s band-mates and friends have begun dreaming as well, seeing themselves in “night pictures” as beings from another world. As Otherborn, they must piece together the story of their astral avatars, the Others, in order to save their world from a dreamless, hopeless future.
When Pauly is murdered and an Otherborn goes missing, London realizes someone is hunting them down. Escaping along the Outroads, they brave the deserted Houselands with only their dreams to guide them. Can they find their friend before the assassin finds them? Will being Otherborn save their lives, or destroy them?
With multiple twists and Fantasy woven throughout, Otherborn is one of those fascinating dystopia reads that you never know what you're going to get. The author, Anna Silver, captures a reprocessed world after a global energy crisis. Greed and fear are the cause and continue to reign. Tycoons flourish while the common people are oppressed, merely surviving on ration tickets, tobacco handouts, and stolen or resold goods. Nothing is created, just reused and remade. Dreams are unheard of, are actually feared, and the "new" even more so.
When London and her friends start dreaming, they learn their dreams are not the ordinary subconscious mind activity but a passageway to another realm, a different plane, and in some unknown time. They discover who they were in another life that's not exactly their own and how their mission was to save a world that's not their own. Like I said, the premise was fascinating.
It was also suspenseful and mysterious. Too mysterious actually. The writing and description style was wonderful, but the style of world building, which uses a lot of withholding of information to keep the story mysterious, created more confusion than anything else. That's not to say the world isn't intriguing—because it is—but it was harder to connect with who and what the characters are.
What's more, when the answer is revealed, the Dystopia abruptly meets Sci-fi/High Fantasy, and I found it a bit disjointed. I couldn't grasp how the worlds connected. How or why the Otherborns came to be or were there to begin with isn't thoroughly explained. Why the people stopped dreaming in the first place is never delved into or even alluded to, either. I needed more explanations and cohesive ideas to fully appreciate all the aspects. Much of the worlds' dynamics revolved around relativity, but I found myself asking, Relative to what? and How is this relevant to now, in this world?
When it comes to Dystopia, I personally need to know how the world reached its circumstances, as well as all the boundaries, to connect and find it believable; otherwise, the universe feels too vast with a lot of black holes. But explanations and how the story's world relates to our world—a certain realism and plausibility—are personal preferences and what I expect of well-rounded Dystopias. The fact that I wasn't expecting psychological Sci-fi, which actually felt High Fantasy to me because of faeries and half-beast men, probably hindered my experience, too.
Overall, Otherborn was a good read. I liked most of the characters, even though I struggled to see them as separate yet joined beings. While I didn't find the worlds fitting seamlessly together, I was engrossed in the plot. There were quite a few twists, the action steadily picks up, and the ending ... it tore my heart, so much so that I bumped up my rating half a star. Fans of Dystopias mixed with Sci-fi and mythological Fantasy will probably want to check this one out.
eARC provided by the author via Xpresso Books Tours.
Thank you!
Thank you!
Favorites lines (out of many):
It wasn't her first kiss, but it was the first one that mattered.
****
He was a rebel through and through, refusing to simply dissolve into the quagmire of a cultureless American youth born with the cord already cut.
Anna Silver is an artist and writer living in the greater Houston area with her family, pets, and overactive imagination. Her art, which includes oil paintings, assemblage sculptures, and fairy houses, has been featured in the Houston gallery Las Manos Magicas. She studied English Writing & Rhetoric at St. Edward’s University in Austin. She has written web copy for private clients and freelanced for the Hill Country Current in Texas. Her write-up on a past-life regression experience was chosen to be featured in best-selling author Brian Weiss’ new book. She is a member of the Writer’s League of Texas. OTHERBORN is her first published novel.
Five (5) eBook copies of Otherborn by Anna Silver
Thank you, Raina, for such a candid review and all your compliments!
ReplyDeleteHreat review! Yjis book sounds great! Thaxs 4 the giveaway! :)
ReplyDeleteRaina nice review. The disjointed and parts and lack of explanation could also be because it was the first book in a series. I've found with many "first" books in a series that it gets confusing but it gets further explained in consecutive books.
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