Book Review - Wayward

Wayward by Blake Crouch
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

These books are just so much fun.

I marked this as currently reading a couple of days ago, but didn't start it until last night. And once again, after I had picked it up I was in it til the end, reading under the covers like I did as a ten-year-old and barely holding in my excitement during the climax of the book.

But this is very hard to review without barfing spoilers all over the place.

If you liked Pines, the first book in this trilogy, you'll like Wayward. If you like creepy, dark novels, you will love this. If you liked shows like Twin Peaks and the X files, or books like The Lottery (The Shirley Jackson one we all read in 8th grade, you know the one), then you will stay up late at night reading this book under the covers and gasping and squealing in all the right places.

It's just so much fun.

I thought I was burned out on dystopia when a recent read that was pretty well reviewed here and on Amazon just bored me and made me question my whole love of the genre. But I still love dystopia. I just love *good* dystopia. These characters are real and relatable and not all-powerful. They are human and flawed, even our hero isn't such an awesome guy. He's just an ordinary husband who makes mistakes and sometimes makes great triumphs.

The world-building here did have me question a couple of places. If they don't have furnaces, why do they have hot water heaters? If they have such limited stores, why are they using disposable styrofoam coffee cups? Things like that. They'd make me hesitate for a second, but not long enough to cost the book a star. If there had been much more of that, maybe. But I wasn't overly troubled.

As happens with the best dystopia, I wanted to be a part of everything. It drew me in that much. I'd probably die first, you know how that goes, but I wanted to be there to see it anyway.

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