Review--Brave New Girl by Rachel Vincent

We have brown hair. Brown eyes. Fair skin. We are healthy and strong and smart. But only one of us has ever had a secret.

Dahlia 16 sees her face in every crowd. She’s nothing special—just one of five thousand girls created from a single genome to work for the greater good of the city.

Meeting Trigger 17 changes everything. He thinks she’s interesting. Beautiful. Unique. Which means he must be flawed. When Dahlia can’t stop thinking about him—when she can't resist looking for him, even though that means breaking the rules—she realizes she’s flawed, too. But if she’s flawed, then so are all her identicals. And any genome found to be flawed will be recalled.

Destroyed.

Getting caught with Trigger would seal not only Dahlia’s fate, but that of all five thousand girls who share her face. But what if Trigger is right? What if Dahlia is different?

Suddenly the girl who always follows the rules is breaking them, one by one by one…

I've had this duology on my TBR pile for way too long and nothing gets me to read a book series faster is knowing that I will be seeing the author very soon! Brave New Girl is the start of Rachel Vincent's dystopian duology of the same title. It's by far one of the shortest of her books if I recall but it was nonetheless very exciting.

The world building of this one was quite unique as there's a lot we don't know but we do get that sort of "in the future" vibe. Dahlia 16 is a clone, one of 5,000 and she has a knack for gardening, particularly with vegetables. In this world, most everyone was designed to excel at a certain talent and by using their talents they make for a better world. Although, one is never to interact with someone outside of their group...which is where Dahlia 16, naturally, finds herself.

After a chance encounter that with the boss that could possibly set herself up for a future that she may or may not want, she is riding the elevator with another boy when the power goes out. Interaction of any kind with anyone outside of your group is forbidden but the fear of being stuck in the stopped elevator becomes too much and Trigger 17 starts a conversation to help her through her fear.

Thinking this encounter would be behind her forever, Dahlia 16 is surprised to discover that Trigger 17 can't seem to stay away. They are courting trouble with their interactions that is exactly what finds them. The romance was a little hard to get into, I will admit. It was very much the "insta" quality kind. Like are we really falling for each other or is it just the "firsts" thing? It was sweet in a sense, but then yeah, at the same time I wasn't really feeling it. Hopefully things will change in the next book!

I will admit that parts of the futuristic society and how the world works was a little confusing at first. Largely because we are given information in bits and pieces throughout the story. So trying to remember this and that part several pages later can be hard to piece together sometimes. But I did get a general understanding of the things so it all worked out.

The pacing to this one was pretty ideal. Keeping the page length in mind, we kind of breeze through things at an accelerated rate.

We learn some puzzling secrets about this world and perhaps a nefarious plot in the works of certain characters. What this will shape out to be isn't quite clear yet, but the ending was definitely eye-opening and was something I sort of saw coming. I mean with the information presented, it seemed a fairly logical deduction! Lol. So it was not great guess on my part as Vincent led me to it all along!

The next and final book will definitely be interesting. With the information that we know that the some of the characters don't quite know yet, is going to make for an interesting explosion to say the least! if you're itching to return to the dystopian genre, be sure to pick this one up! I am extremely late to the game, but I will admit it is always more fun to binge a series than suffer through the waiting!

Overall Rating 3.5/5 stars