Pure (Pure #1) by Julianna Baggott

Pure by Julianna Baggott
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After you read Pure, you can claim you read some pretty philosophical and world-changing stuff. After you read Pure, you can also claim that Pressia was too @#@!##$# of a character and that it was really slow and Bradwell was a pretty lame romantic interest.

On my scale, though, the good outweighs the bad. So it turned out okay.

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.

The first thing that immediately captured my attention was the present tense with the third person. That might drive some people crazy, but I thought it was an interesting style. Not until I realized that Pressia had a doll's head for a hand. Yeah. That completely left the whole style thing in the dust.

Throughout this book, thoroughly weird things like this is always popping up. A guy who has bird wings in his back, a person fused with his brother, mothers forever stuck to their children. It was disturbing. And that made it really disturbing to realize that this was one of the coolest things to happen in this book. You can run away now, if you want to.

The plot shuddered along like an old car on a long, bumpy road. It would be pretty exciting for a seconds, but then it veered off the road. For a majority of the book, I was very confused on what any of that had to do with anything else.

And if you think there's going to be something something between Pressia and Partridge, don't. That's all I'm going to say.

Overall, made me think. That's the best kind of book.


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