The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken

The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken

Genre- Science fiction, fantasy, action, dystopian

“He’s so busy looking inside people to find the good that he misses the knife they’re holding in their hand.”- Alexandra Bracken, The Darkest Minds.

Written by Alexandra Bracken, an American New York Times bestselling author, “The Darkest Minds” is a unique book which will captivate you in a world brimming with fantasy, action and thrill. Alexandra Bracken has skillfully woven together words to create scenes of suspense and tension, where hurricanes of emotions are going to rip out of you.

The book takes place in a futuristic United States of America, where a disease known as IAAN - “Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration” - grows rampant in the bodies of ten-year-old children, killing them or leaving them with supernatural powers. Soon enough, ninety-eight percent of children are dead, while the remaining are sent off to rehabilitation camps, where they live under torture and terror, a place where every wrong action is punished. In the camps, the mutated are split  into categories and, among these, the most dangerous (the “oranges”, “reds” and “yellows”), are taken away and never seen again.

On her tenth birthday, Ruby - the main character - is taken away from her parents  by the government army, after she accidentally unleashes her powers of mind manipulation caused by the IAAN disease. However, due to some flaws in the government control system, Ruby escapes her fate of death as an “orange” and lives her life in a rehabilitation camp. When she turns sixteen,  an association of rebels called the “Children’s League” help Ruby escape from the camp. After their successful escape, she ends up with a group of runaway children, as they set off into the country in search for the “Slip Kid”, a child who is said to be able to help them find their parents. But is the “Slip Kid” really who they think he is…?

If you like action-packed dystopian novels where every page results in twists and turns, this is the book for you. I thoroughly enjoyed this page-turner and would recommend it to 12+’s in search for a book which will captivate them from the start to the finish. Furthermore, the story is well written and provides the reader with a strong moral on friendship: true friends stick together in times of need, true friends help each other, true friends allow each other to hope.

“Maybe nothing will ever change us,” he said. “But don’t you want to be around just in case it does?” Alexandra Bracken- Darkest Minds

Reviewed by Marta

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