A review by cheezysquash
True Calling by Siobhan Davis

3.0

~~Digital copy kindly provided by the author, Siobhan Davis, in a exchange for a honest review.~~

Let me start by saying I did enjoy this book. Mildly at some points, and a lot at other points. But there were also many times when I did not enjoy this book, at all.

This novel was a nice read about a dystoypian future, where Earth has been ravaged and many evacuated to a new planet named Novo. After living on Novo for two years, the government decided there should be an event to build up the population, and this event should be a televised pageant. But under the surface unrest is rising both with the the people left behind on earth, and with some on Novo itself.

While this is an interesting premise, I feel there were a few areas lacking. One was the pacing of the plot. It jumped from quick to almost a stand still in a matter of paragraphs. It would highlight unimportant points and glaze over what I feel could have made this novel more understandable. There were many points where the main character would be having a conversation with another character in the morning, then jump to her finishing the conversation with herself in bed at night. I would find myself having to look back many times just to see what setting I am in now.

This book has elements of the typical dystopian that we all love to read about such as, future technology, a government trying to oppress its people, a love story, and a revolution. The only problem with this is that the author did not spend enough time detailing any of these key factors and plot points, and that left me feeling like I only read part of this story.

Spoiler

One last thing that I wont touch on much is the love story between Cal and Ariana. Lets just say I hated almost every moment of it, and it made me physically angry. (Part of the reason Im sure it took me so long to read this book was because of how many times I had to put it down because of how ridiculous Ariana could be) She was extremely selfish and thought that her needs were more important than the good of everyone else. The reason I am not fully putting this in mt review yet is because I don't know how it ends.

Some points that I felt would have made this a killer novel.

A consistent flow

Spoiler

It was nice to see a little from Zane's point of view, but It felt shoved in and didn't really do much for the plot

Elaborate more on the elements of the book. I wanted to see more technology, I want to know more about what happened to earth, give me more on the revolution, what about The Calling, most of it was given a sideways mention at best.

With all of this aside, this was not a terrible novel. I did finish it and I do plan on reading the sequels in the future. Hopefully they will answer some of the questions above. I see lots of good this coming from this author.