Rating: ✰✰✰

Anya Balanchine’s world is very complicated. The year is 2083, her parent’s are dead, her family runs an illegal chocolate business, a candidate for mayor is out to get her and she is only 16. Living in Manhattan is tough for Anya and author Gabrielle Zevin portrays the hardships Anya has to face.

For starters, Anya has to take care of her siblings. She has an older brother named Leo, but he has gotten into a car accident that has damaged his brain, and he was unfit to be a guardian in the state’s eyes. She also has a younger sister, Natty, and she has a bedridden grandmother who was her and her siblings’  “guardian,” but Anya mostly took care of her family.

Unfortunately, Anya’s world turns upside down when her ex-boyfriend gets poisoned by chocolate. In the United States, chocolate is illegal, as well as other things such as coffee and cell phones, until one turns 18. The bad news was that Anya gave the contaminated chocolate to Gable, without knowing it was poisoned. As a result,  Anya had to figure out who poisoned the supply of chocolate before the police decide that it was all her doing and lock her in jail.

Along the way things did brighten up a little when Anya met Goodwin Delecroix, Win for short. Win was everything to Anya, but she did not want him to fall in love with her because of all the crazy stuff she was mixed up in. There is nothing worse than hurting the people one loves, and that is exactly what Anya was afraid of.

Not to mention that Win’s father was Charles Delecroix, one of the candidates for mayor. Delecroix was out to get Anya just because he did not want her to see Win. Anya and Win tried to keep their distance, but it was a lot easier said then done.

As one can see, Anya had a lot to deal with in her life. She had to find out who poisoned the supply, she had to stay away from the one boy she loved and she had to take care of her family. Also, she had to do all of this at the age of sixteen.

In my opinion,  this book was like a soap opera. It was problem after problem after problem and it was so annoying. Hardly anything got resolved. And this was not just the one book, it went on throughout the whole series. There is nothing worse than just reading something that was just written to be published. I felt like Zevin had a very unique writing style and it was written very well, however I just got bored. I got bored really easily. The book did not have one main conflict, it had a bunch of tiny ones, which was why I rated it three out of five stars because it did not satisfy my taste.

I would recommend this book to dystopian and action genre lovers. It is an interesting read, because it takes place in the future in a corrupted Manhattan. Also, the setting of the book is astonishing, but the plot of the book is just plain. What I mean by this is there was no main conflict. Zevin wrote about Anya’s problems, but it got to the point where I was not excited to read how the next problem got resolved. I was done with the book before it was actually over. However, I would definitely read this book because of the setting. Zevin had a phenomenal way of describing the way Manhattan looked in 2083, and I could picture the city in my mind throughout the whole entire book; it was that descriptive.

All in all, this book is worth the read because of the unique writing style and the description of the setting.