I loved this! Not sure how I feel about seeing that, like every other YA book these days, it’s already listed as a series, #1. Yes, I’d enjoy reading more about these characters and I would have liked a little bit of a tidier ending, but honestly when I finished it just now I thought that was it, it was a great story, it was done.
Although this is set in the future I did not think of it as a futuristic novel. Technology did not seem especially advanced and in fact, things seemed pretty grey and depressed. With water being super scarce the world has changed. I’m sure the author had a lot of fun with details like the Statue of Liberty being reduced to just the feet and the base being turned into a juvenile detention facility.
As the daughter of a dead organized crime boss (they deal in black market chocolate) Anya Balanchine’s main goal in life is to protect what’s left of her family-her simple brother, her sister, and her dying elderly grandmother (in a neat bit of calculating the elderly grandmother would have been a teenager in our present day-she was born in 1995 and in the story she is in her late 80s.) Her life is complicated when she falls for the son of the new DA and she is warned away from him. Making things worse, despite her vow to not be involved in the family business she is being pressured to be a part of it.
I am not a fan of mafia stories, The Sopranos, or The Godfather, so I was a bit worried I wouldn’t like this. Fortunately there was minimal violence and most of it occurred off screen, so to speak.
This was a really engaging story, which I definitely expected from this author. The whole reason I picked it up is because I recognized her name as being the author of Elsewhere, a book I was utterly charmed by.
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