BOOK REVIEW: Unwanted by Amanda Holohan

All her life, eighteen-year-old Bea has wanted nothing more than to become a sniper on the wall and earn the coveted ink of a Dread warrior – a mark of distinction among her people.

She knows that one day the terrifying Erebii might break through the city’s outer defences, and if her people aren’t prepared and the wall is breached then the last human city will fall.

But everything Bea thinks she knows is about to be challenged…

What does the ink really do as it flows underneath their skin and who is the mysterious Unwanted boy that keeps appearing in her life?

Source: Penguin Random House Australia
317 pages

My Rating

This book was a dystopian fail. I really wanted to like this book but no matter how many times I talked myself against it, my argument would just fall apart. There were many times during the novel where I was struggling to finish it because I was just not pulled in by the story, writing or characters.

This story was generally very bland. The characters were dull and two dimensional, their voice and motivations lacked something to make them memorable and stand out. Bea is a talented girl who all her life has just wanted to be a sniper for the small, post-apocalyptic world she yearns to fight for and protect against the Erebii who I think is supposed to be this sort of alien who can shift forms. She’s a hard working and driven introvert who has lost her father to suicide who was also a sniper, an owl which is like the highest rant of snipers. She has also lost her mother to the Farm which is like a punishment centre for rebels. Now, Bea is left with only her older sister,Joy who is a Stork, a job that pays woman to be surrogates and provide their world with the new generation. And also the youngest, Abby who does not talk. Together, they’re supposed to create an unfortunate family who rely on each other. Instead, I felt their relationship was shallow and how they treated each other was like how you treat someone you don’t know well. Too much politeness, not enough affection. Bea was such a gullible character. There was so much evidence out there that she had plainly seen that should have made her realise that her world was not what it was said to be but still she whined and whined about how it’s a mistake. Blah blah blah

The plot itself was quite uneventful. What was supposed to be a realization and plot twist was actually not surprising. It was a very bland and predictable dystopian book. There was too much talking and not enough action. The ending was very anti-climatic and rushed. What I think was supposed to be a romance, just fell quite flat.

I thought the ink thing was pretty cool. The people in this world get tattoos which symbolise your job and the cool part is that they move according to your emotions. That was one of the small things that interested me. All their inks take the form of a different animal. Bea’s was a moth. It was a different and original concept with I liked.

So in conclusion, nothing happened much in this book. I’m really disappointed that I didn’t enjoy this one. The idea of the novel didn’t pull me in, in the first place. The writing was slow and average, the plot was the same and the characters fell flat, all of them blurring into one.