Forever Obsession: Unworthy

ISBN: 1500807478
Pages: 199 (My Edition)

(Goodreads: 315)
Source: Author

Appearance:

Summary:

Nearly two hundred years after a killer disease swept the planet, an island nation continues its isolated survival due to the ruthless dedication of its military. The laws and culture of the country are based on the survival of the fittest, distrust of disease, and control of the general population.
Marked at birth as “Unworthy” to be raised, a young woman questions the necessity for the cruel practice, so many years after the Isolation was declared. She embarks on a journey which will uncover truths about her past and about her society which she could never have imagined.

Hello everyone! Welcome back to another review, I finally have my review for Unworthy up! Just in time for the end of the month. Thanks so much to Joanne Armstrong for sending me a copy for review, let's see what I thought of it: (All thoughts are 100% my own)

Unworthy takes place in a disease ravaged world where a military government controls the lives of the remaining survivors. Arcadia is one of the Unworthy, marked at birth due to her weak immune system and she's always dreamed of life outside the Hubs. Now her adventure arrives and she's thrust into the real world. As she travels to the capital city of Polis, she finds out the truth about herself and her society which completely changes how the world seems.

The world of Unworthy is really interesting and revolves strictly around a military government. The government itself is a bit vague, but essentially there is a Council which remains pretty mysterious until the end. They are the ones in power that all the General answer to. There are four Generals who are in charge of all the military. Those who serve in the military are Firstborn children, male or female, who are sent to Polis when the reach a certain age to train. Then you have sectors which contain Hubs. These are where the normal people live and it's a pretty tightly controlled life.

Since it is dystopian, there is obviously something wrong with the government. By orders of the Council, all baby girls who reveal any sort of weak immune system or signs of sickness are left out in the wild for one night to see if they can survive the virus. Usually, even if they survive the night, they don't last more than a week.

Arcadia is one of the unusual. She's marked as an Unworthy and dedicates her life to secretly protecting her younger Unworthy "sisters" from any predators during their trial night. So far she's saved twelve but only seven of them have survived past the first week. As a character, she's pretty strongly built, but I felt loosely detached to her. I definitely admired her willpower and dedicated, but I can't pinpoint a moment where I felt connected to her character. That being said, she's still a really strong female lead and I'm really interested to see where that will take her, especially after the ending.

Then we have Alex. At first he felt a bit detach-y to me as well, but I actually connected more with him than I did with Arcadia. Throughout the book you get to see him grow and really find out about his life as a Polisborn solider. He's definitely left a rough life, but that only made him stronger as a person. I liked how the romance, if you can call it that, was slow developing between Arcadia and Alex. It allowed you to develop your opinion on each character and showed the whole relationship develop, if that makes any sense. However, there's something of a love triangle? It's only hinted at, but there was a sort of relationship between Arcadia and her childhood friend Bastian. However, once Arcadia and Alex were inside Polis and she found out that Bastian wouldn't be hurt because of her, he kind of vanished from the picture.

The plot twist wasn't expected, but at the same time it was. I didn't anticipate the reason behind Arcadia's summon to Polis, but I knew that she would potentially be in charge of changing the current government. The book ended on a bit of a short note so I'm a bit surprised that Goodreads has this marked as 315 pages since my copy only had about 200. The ending was a bit abrupt and off, which left me a bit confused as to what exactly is going on next.

Overall, the book is a nice start to a new dystopian series and I'm definitely interested to see what happens next as book one really only set the stage of the overall story. Again, many thanks to the author for sending me a copy!