SAFE - Dawn Husted

One of the cool perks of writing a book review blog is that sometimes new authors reach out to you and ask you to read and review their book. How cool is that? For a book nerd like me, it’s pretty awesome. I was recently contacted for such a task recently by Dawn Husted to review her book, SAFE. This book is a dystopian, Young Adult novel which can be a pretty intimidating genre to bust in to right now with the HUGE hits of late like The Hunger Games and Divergent series.

Many years ago, massive earthquakes devastated the world. Survivors settled The Colony to try and rebuild a safe and stable place to live. It is here where everything in society is carefully planned out and keeps its residents under close scrutiny which is all necessary to keep civilization alive. Original settlers were injected with a vaccine to keep them free of contagious and fatal diseases. This vaccine eventually became integrated into everyone’s DNA, which President Falcon says helps keep their colony thriving.

SAFE follows the journey of Penny and James whose worlds are flipped upside down one day when Penny is taken from her home and told that she is sick. She faces two options – either exile or execution. In haste, Penny learns about a sister, Madeline, she never knew she had and her father says she must go find and rescue her. She and her boyfriend James make an attempt to escape the Colony and find her sister but must overcome many obstacles on their quest to find Madeline.

Overall, the story line was captivating and had some good twists and turns that you don’t see coming. It took me a little while to get in to the book as I found the language in the beginning a bit disjointed and wordy at times. Penny and James are both extremely likable characters that are easy to root for from beginning to end.

Since I don’t do spoilers, I won’t say what happens at the end but I did think the story ended a bit abruptly. Sudden endings seemed to be a bit of a theme throughout this story as I felt like many of the conflicts that Penny and James faced were resolved a bit too easily and swiftly. I’m not sure though if this book is the first in a series, so that may explain the sudden ending to the story.

In the end, this was a quick read that I think could be a good introduction for young readers into dystopian novels. If you are looking for something to read in a couple of days that has lots of action and interesting characters - go check this one out!

Rating: Good 7 out of 10