THE STORY
When Sorrel is looking for her boyfriend David and her little brother Eli, she arrives in the town of Dinawl, which is ruled by strange monitors. She encounters a rebel group, whose leader promises to help her find David and Eli, after she helped the rebels with their rebellion against the monitors. After the monitors burn down the Dregs Sorrel wants to help the people who lived there, but soon realises that good and bad are hard to divide.
MY OPINION
World
The portrayal of the world is just as well as it was in the first part. I didn‘t encounter any irregularities to the former describtions. Personally I‘d love to get to know more about the Before and the catastrophe which lead us to now. We get to know, that Dinawl and the Dregs were built by parts of the metro above the ground, but the part underground was forgotten. There are hints about the Before (like the zoo), which makes everything more believable. What I feel is abit odd, is that Sorrel doesn‘t know rats, although she doesn‘t live that far away from Dinawl, where she probably woud encounter some herself.
Characters
Sorrels character doesn‘t stray far from the first part of the series. She still wants to help the people living in the Dregs and doesn‘t back away from telling Niven. Her naivity lets her stumble into the craziest situations, which I can‘t comprehend. Yeah, she grew up in a small village and has to learn a lot about her work, but she doesn‘t seem to learn at all, still falling for the stupidest of things.
Davids character doesn‘t seem to grow, either. He still only knows hate, even after he finds Sorrel again and gets freed from his thrallband. He can‘t trust even the girl he loves, which makes him pretty unpopular.
Einstein is one of my favourite characters in this series. He still doesn‘t seem to have any faults, except for being a mutant of course, but we do learn a lot more about him and his life this time. Knowing more about him also makes his choices believable.
Niven is one of those characters who gave me the creeps from the start. I didn‘t like him in the first part, so it wasn‘t a surprise, that I didn‘t like him in the second part. He‘s very powerdriven and I can‘t tell why Sorrel doesn‘t see that from the start. He also doesn‘t seem to have any good character traits (as well as Yolanda), which doesn‘t make him too believable. He lacks the believable part, because other than his need for power he doesn‘t have any goals and knowing almost nothing about his past, doesn‘t help.
Story
I love that the second part starts as soon as the first part ended. There isn‘t a long story before anything starts and the reader just gets thrown back into the story. Sadly I found the first part of the second book a bit too predictable. The rebellion was over way too fast after they started it, but it brought Sorrel back to her first plan: Finding her little brother.
Personally I thought the books were parted rather weirdly. The last chapters always get a little boring and are more like what I imagine as the start of a book, where the reader gets exited for the big thing happening in the end. The way to find Eli for example would have been better placed in the beginning of another book. After all the rebellion and her following search for Eli are two very different stories.
CONCLUSION
After an okay start with the first book, the second book was a little better. This time I had a much better start, because the story started off right away. Sometimes plottwists were too obvious for my taste and some characters were too much bad guy, without anything likable.
Even with the negative things said, I liked it in the end and I really want to know the rest of the story, so I will be reading the following books aswell, even though I might not run to the bookstore as soon as they get published.