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A review by thewellreadrunner
The Ultimate Choice by Lisa C. Hinsley
2.0
I thought the premise of this book was very promising...very Hunger Games meets The Unit. I loved both of those books, so I thought this would be a good merger.
While the background is interesting (it's set in a future UK in which suicide is legalized and premartial sex is outlawed in an effort to curb population growth, because everyone is starving), the writing and the characters made this fall flat for me. First of all, I never got a good sense of how old Cassie was. At the beginning I was getting the sense that she was a teenager, and that maybe this was a YA novel (a la Hunger Games). But after a rather graphic sexual scene early on, I quickly concluded that was not the case. Even so, Cassie's character is portrayed as SO completely naive that she really seems downright stupid at times. I get that she lived a sheltered life, but I think the idea of her naivete was really overdone to the point where she became rather annoying. (Example: you just gave birth to a baby boy but yet you confess halfway through the novel that you don't know how guys urinate? Please.)
Beyond Cassie's character, I felt that some of the plot lines were just cheesy or odd.The Liam/Cassie relationship was so quickly thrown together that it was hardly believable. Liam goes from downright hating to dearly loving Cassie in less than 36 hours? And the whole "no one should ever feel alone in this world" line was puke-inducing. And the ending left me feeling confused. Cassie spent the entire book trying to get her son back, then decides to off herself because she never really knew him anyway? Huh??
Overall...I think this was a book with a lot of promise conceptually, but more time should have been spent on the characters and plot lines for it to make sense. I feel like a lot of it just wasn't well thought-through, and it left me as a reader feeling a bit confused.
While the background is interesting (it's set in a future UK in which suicide is legalized and premartial sex is outlawed in an effort to curb population growth, because everyone is starving), the writing and the characters made this fall flat for me. First of all, I never got a good sense of how old Cassie was. At the beginning I was getting the sense that she was a teenager, and that maybe this was a YA novel (a la Hunger Games). But after a rather graphic sexual scene early on, I quickly concluded that was not the case. Even so, Cassie's character is portrayed as SO completely naive that she really seems downright stupid at times. I get that she lived a sheltered life, but I think the idea of her naivete was really overdone to the point where she became rather annoying. (Example: you just gave birth to a baby boy but yet you confess halfway through the novel that you don't know how guys urinate? Please.)
Beyond Cassie's character, I felt that some of the plot lines were just cheesy or odd.
Overall...I think this was a book with a lot of promise conceptually, but more time should have been spent on the characters and plot lines for it to make sense. I feel like a lot of it just wasn't well thought-through, and it left me as a reader feeling a bit confused.