[amazon_link id=”1455503061″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ][/amazon_link]Title : Pure
Author : Julianna Baggott
Genre : Dystopian/Horror
Pages : 448
Publisher : Grand Central Publishing
Source : NetGalley Publisher ARC
Rating : 4/5

Pure is not your ordinary dystopian novel, it treads into the horror category. It is a story of a bleak future, one where the Detonations have maimed and deformed all life that remains. A selected few were chosen and taken to a safe Dome, and remained unaffected – they are the Pures – the one with whole limbs and whole faces. The rest are like Pressia, fused to whatever object they were near when the world exploded. Pressia has a doll’s head fused to one hand, Bradwell has live birds in his back, and others have glass, metal and a variety of other objects embedded in them. They live in a world with scarce resources, a dog-eat-dog world, struggling to survive from one day to the next. The only law there is is the OSR, a thuggish army given to unexplained raids and killing sprees. All young adults are required to turn themselves into the OSR at age 16.

If you don’t turn yourself  in, they will take you. This isn’t just a whisper. That’s the truth. There are whispers that they will take you to the out lands where you’re untaught to read – if you’ve learned in the first place, like Pressia has. Her grandfather taught her letters and showed her the Message: We know you are here, our brothers and sisters . . .(No one speaks of the Message anymore. Here grandfather has hidden it away somewhere.) There are whispers that they then teach you how to kill by use of live targets. And there are whispers that either you will learn to kill or, if you’re too deformed by the Detonations, you’ll be used as a live target, and that will be the end of you.

Pressia turns 16, and goes renegade. She meets up with Bradwell who’s anti OSR. Then they meet Partridge Willux, a Pure who has left the Dome of his own free will, to look for his mother. He is unprepared for the devastation he sees, and for the hatred towards people like him, the privileged Pures. He can barely survive until he meets Pressia. When Pressia is taken by the OSR, both Bradwell and Partridge set out in her search.

I thought this book very interesting. The premise is a little over-used, but Bagggott invents a whole new theory to explain the dystopian horror.  While the horror in unanticipated and disturbing, it is also richly imagined. Pressia, Bradwell and Partridge make convincing protagonists and are developed well; I read along engrossed in their struggle. The bad guys, cold and inhuman and oh-so-calculating gave me the shivers. Baggott paints a descriptive picture of the bleak world in which Pressia and Bradwell live. The different points of view, each the perspective of a different character, drive home the sometimes deranged thoughts, deprivation and danger of a world after the apocalypse.

Towards the end, the story got a little too involved with the technology, the automatons, and the theorizing, which to me weakened the effect of the book.  But I still liked it because of the engaging characters, particularly Pressia.