A review by kari_f
Poster Girl by Veronica Roth

challenging emotional reflective sad

3.5

“You felt it, but you taught yourself to ignore it, because it was everywhere, because you didn’t trust yourself. Because they told you not to trust yourself.”

Dystopian to the core, Poster Girl exists in a world 10 years after an uprising they overthrew a tyrannical government known as The Delegation. The main character, the daughter one of its leaders, is locked away in a community made up of Delegation leaders and the family members who survived the uprising. She is given an opportunity to gain freedom by completing a seemingly impossible task, and as she plays detective, she discovers details that make her question everything she’s ever believed in.

Things I enjoyed:

👁️ The world building was done well, and it was easy to jump in and understand the motives of those on both sides of the uprising.

👁️ The main characters were deeply flawed people trying to make amends and grow from their past experiences.

👁️ The book almost has a dystopia within a dystopia, if that makes sense. Life under The Delegation marks the classic dystopian environment, and we go a step further here to see the society that followed the regime. We are treated to the aftermath of the uprising and we see whether life can go back to what it was or if the new government is just as terrible as the previous one. We also have a child of The Delegation as our main character, rather than someone who is standing up to the tyrannical government.

👁️ The book is unnervingly relevant, and it’s easy to see how technology and capitalism advanced together to get their society to where it was. The precursors are all present in our real world.



Things I think could have been better:

👁️ There were big storylines that didn’t feel resolved by the end.

👁️ The pacing was a bit slow in areas.

👁️ It felt like there was some depth missing, and I would have loved a bit more layering as the main character learns more and more about her family, her co-prisoners, and The Delegation’s many misdeeds.


Overall, I enjoyed the book and felt like it was a pretty solid dystopian story.

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