Review: Plus One

Reviewer: Kelsey
Author: Elizabeth Fama
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 373
Rating: 4 out of 10

Summary (I'll be your Plus One, Goodreads): It takes guts to deliberately mutilate your hand while operating a blister-pack sealing machine, but all I had going for me was guts.

Sol Le Coeur is a Smudge—a night dweller in an America rigidly divided between people who wake, live, and work during the hours of darkness and those known as Rays who live and work during daylight. Impulsive, passionate, and brave, Sol deliberately injures herself in order to gain admission to a hospital, where she plans to kidnap her newborn niece—a Ray—in order to bring the baby to visit her dying grandfather. By violating the day-night curfew, Sol is committing a serious crime, and when the kidnap attempt goes awry it starts a chain of events that will put Sol in mortal danger, uncover a government conspiracy to manipulate the Smudge population, and throw her together with D'Arcy Benoît, the Ray medical apprentice who first treats her, then helps her outrun the authorities—and with whom she is fated to fall impossibly and irrevocably in love.

Set in a vivid alternate reality and peopled with complex, deeply human characters on both sides of the day-night divide, Plus One is a brilliantly imagined drama of individual liberty and civil rights—and a compelling, rapid-fire romantic adventure story.

So: I'm tired of novels about the struggle that is social justice. Don't we have enough of those? It's our normal life a struggle enough. Sigh.

The night versus day concept was interesting and the cover was beautiful but the follow through was lacking. WHO JUST KIDNAPS A BABY? A character that does that is a hard character to get behind. Is it really worth your life? It's nice that you want to help your only remaining family member but I bet he would tell you not to do this too.

I loved D'Arcy but, man, was he stupid too. I thought his father was pretty great. 

Also, to make matters worse. The ending sucked. It just stops, leaving you in the middle of nowhere, on a desert road where robbers will come and rob you and take everything you own, leaving you to die and let the bird pick out your eyes...okay, sorry, I'm bitter. 

This novel wasn't as good as I'd hoped. I think that this novel is for younger readers who can deal with a little violence but don't expect too much from a story. It was too... simple (?) in many ways. It was a story with conspiracy but little detail or explanation at how we arrived at ideas or how a teenager managed to accomplish all that she did. 

I didn't like this novel. What do you think about it?

P.S. I think a prequel book for this series could be something really cool with a bit of work. I want to know what happened to get us to the point we are at in this novel.