ThTi­tle

Title: Pure
(Ama­zon, Goodreads, Web­site)
Author: Julianna Bag­gott
(Ama­zon, Goodreads, Web­site)
Series: Pure
Pub­lisher: Grand Cen­tral Pub­lish­ing
Genre: YA, Sci­ence Fic­tion
For­mat: Paper­back
Source: Pub­lisher at BEA 2011

Syn­op­sis:

We know you are here, our broth­ers and sis­ters …
Pres­sia barely remem­bers the Det­o­na­tions or much about life dur­ing the Before. In her sleep­ing cab­i­net behind the rub­ble of an old bar­ber­shop where she lives with her grand­fa­ther, she thinks about what is lost-how the world went from amuse­ment parks, movie the­aters, birth­day par­ties, fathers and moth­ers … to ash and dust, scars, per­ma­nent burns, and fused, dam­aged bod­ies. And now, at an age when every­one is required to turn them­selves over to the mili­tia to either be trained as a sol­dier or, if they are too dam­aged and weak, to be used as live tar­gets, Pres­sia can no longer pre­tend to be small. Pres­sia is on the run.

Burn a Pure and Breathe the Ash …
There are those who escaped the apoc­a­lypse unmarked. Pures. They are tucked safely inside the Dome that pro­tects their healthy, supe­rior bod­ies. Yet Par­tridge, whose father is one of the most influ­en­tial men in the Dome, feels iso­lated and lonely. Dif­fer­ent. He thinks about loss-maybe just because his fam­ily is bro­ken; his father is emo­tion­ally dis­tant; his brother killed him­self; and his mother never made it inside their shel­ter. Or maybe it’s his claus­tro­pho­bia: his feel­ing that this Dome has become a swad­dling of intensely rigid order. So when a slipped phrase sug­gests his mother might still be alive, Par­tridge risks his life to leave the Dome to find her.

When Pres­sia meets Par­tridge, their worlds shat­ter all over again.

Review:

This sat on my shelf since last year’s BEA.  The cover always intrigued me, but I never picked it up until shortly before I left for BEA 2012.  I recently fin­ished it, tak­ing longer than I expected it to take me.  I attribute that to the lack of story.  The world is amaz­ingly detailed in some instances, yet lack­ing in oth­ers. How big is the Dome? How much of the world is sur­round by the Melt­lands? What hap­pened to the rest of the world?  How is it pos­si­ble to be fused with sen­tient and non-sentient things and have them or you still func­tion?  So many ques­tions and too few answers.

I wanted to love this book.  The idea behind it was a great start­ing point, but unfor­tu­nately, it didn’t pan out.  While Pres­sia and Par­tridge are the cen­tral char­ac­ters, I found myself more inter­ested in minor char­ac­ters like Lyda and El Cap­i­tan who seemed to have more depth to their char­ac­ters than Pres­sia and Par­tridge com­bined.  Brad­well pro­vided a few ben­e­fits to the story, but most of the time I felt he was only there to fill in the gaps and offer a pos­si­ble love inter­est for Pressia.

Despite the short­com­ings, I know I will pick up the sec­ond book due out in 2013 as I do want to know where Bag­gott is going to take this story.  Per­haps now that she has laid the ground­work, the sec­ond part will pick up the pace and get on with the story.