Although I already have PLENTY of books waiting to be read on my Kindle (and my physical bookshelves), I wasn’t feeling too well over Christmas, and an email came from Amazon offering The Gender Game and The Last Girl for 99p each – so I downloaded them … sold as ‘if you liked the Hunger Games, you’ll probably like these’, which is probably a fair analysis!
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lla Forrest (who appears to be better known for Vampire novels – something I’m not a particular fan of), has created a post-apocalyptic dystopian world in which Patrus is ruled by men – and women have little/no rights or say, and Matrus is ruled by women – in which only boys who demonstrate little aggression in their DNA survive. In The Gender Game, Violet Bates, sentenced to death by Matrus for causing death through anger, is given the opportunity to redeem herself through undertaking a risky venture into Patrus…. and it twists and turns from there. I’ve finished The Gender Secret too, and The Gender Lie comes out on New Year’s Eve. Just the kind of thing I enjoy reading when tired – plenty of ‘moral tone’ to focus on!
The other book I downloaded is The Last Girl, and this is also set in a post-apocalyptic world (also the USA!) – in which by the mid-2020s, the birth of girls was incredibly rare, and so the government ‘imprisoned’ those who were born and undertook experiments seeking to find the ‘keystone’ that would reverse the ‘problem’. Our heroine escapes, finds she’s been lied to, and starts to find a way to release the others who were also captured. At the end of the first book she’s been in a wheelchair suffering paralysis for weeks – but her big toe has just moved… so I have the second book The Final Trade downloaded, and the third will be released in Spring 2017.
