Article 5 (Article 5 #1) by Kristen Simmons

Description: The Bill of Rights has been revoked, and replaced with the Moral Statutes.

There are no more police—instead, there are soldiers. There are no more fines for bad behavior—instead, there are arrests, trials, and maybe worse. People who get arrested usually don’t come back.

Seventeen-year-old Ember Miller is old enough to remember that things weren’t always this way. Living with her rebellious single mother, it’s hard for her to forget that people weren’t always arrested for reading the wrong books or staying out after dark. It’s hard to forget that life in the United States used to be different.

Ember has perfected the art of keeping a low profile. She knows how to get the things she needs, like food stamps and hand-me-down clothes, and how to pass the random home inspections by the military. Her life is as close to peaceful as circumstances allow.

That is, until her mother is arrested for noncompliance with Article 5 of the Moral Statutes. And one of the arresting officers is none other than Chase Jennings—the only boy Ember has ever lovedReview: I so badly wanted to love this book, I really did. I gave it all of the chance in the world to wow me but sadly it did not. I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy reading it, I did to a certain extent, but there were some major issues that really spoiled some of the fun.

First, I found that the book moved far too fast. I like books that are fast paced but there has to be enough time to be able to establish setting and character and their relationships to each other. The characters moved from place to place so fast that very few of the settings really made any impact on them in a lasting way. Characters seemed to go “Yep, that happened, I was there, moving on” and forgot about it in the next scene.

The big problem with this book is that I really saw nothing to differentiate this dystopian for every other dystopian ever written. There was nothing at all that made this book stand apart. If I put this book in a pile with a bunch of other YA dystopians and had to identify what made each one different from every other dystopian, I could do it for almost all of them except this one. There is nothing that makes this book special at all, even the female protagonist is sort of boring. As a character she does nothing to make the book it’s own entity.

All in all the book was ok, it wasn’t a terrible read. The writing was solid even if it moved too fast. However, I could not ignore that the book had several very serious flaws. I want to continue the series in the hopes that book two might prove to be better than this first installment. Hopefully I will not find myself as disappointed as I was in this book, but if I am I’m not invested enough to be as upset as I would be if I were reading I series that I truly loved.

Have you read this series? What did you think? Leave a comment and let me know.

Happy Reading!
The Book Nut

Coming Soon…
Clockwork Angel Review