I hate to be one of those people who judge a book by its cover, so I generally completely ignore covers except to let me know what genre or sub-genre I might be dealing with. Even so, there's sometimes covers that are so atrociously bad that it starts seeping in and polluting my idea about what the book might be about, poisoning my desire to pick it up, or otherwise make me want to run, screaming, from the room.



FORTUNATELY, however, once I got beyond this really, really bad cover, I discovered a

I hate to be one of those people who judge a book by its cover, so I generally completely ignore covers except to let me know what genre or sub-genre I might be dealing with. Even so, there's sometimes covers that are so atrociously bad that it starts seeping in and polluting my idea about what the book might be about, poisoning my desire to pick it up, or otherwise make me want to run, screaming, from the room.



FORTUNATELY, however, once I got beyond this really, really bad cover, I discovered a very decent story beneath. :) It's YA, but it's a very detailed and grounded YA that then turns into the fictional equivalent of an Ayn Rand love letter mashup with conformity ghouls and high-tech networking. :)



Cool, right? Well, I enjoy all of Rand's stuff, so that's not really a big deal for me, one way or another... and philosophy, especially when we add cameos of Stalin and the inanities of really stupid government policies based on fear and jealousy, can only be improved with a big adventure tale to destroy all the government and corporation ghouls who suck every spark of individuality out of the world. :)



Yay! Message! And it's fun. The best part has got to be the very deeply developed main characters and the solid grounding of the early settings. It was then extremely easy to jump right into the SF.



I totally recommend this for people who want ghoulish action with Objectivism. This is the kind of thing that fans of Goodkind would love as well. :)



Thanks to the author for a copy of this ARC!