Black City(Black City Chronicles 1)Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2012Genre: YA DystopiaOverview
In a city where humans and Darklings are now separated by a high wall and tensions between the two races still simmer after a terrible war, sixteen-year-olds Ash Fisher, a half-blood Darkling, and Natalie Buchanan, a human and the daughter of the Emissary, meet and do the unthinkable—they fall in love. Bonded by a mysterious connection, that causes Ash’s long dormant heart to beat, Ash and Natalie first deny and then struggle to fight their forbidden feelings for each other, knowing if they’re caught they’ll be executed—but their feelings are too strong. When Ash and Natalie then find themselves at the center of a deadly conspiracy that threatens to pull the humans and Darklings back into war, they must make hard choices that could result in both their deaths.
Black City has just come out of a war.
The place is devastated in most places, there's poverty, discrimination, and a
whole lot of black from the fire's that ravaged the city. The Darklings—a race
of vampire-like creatures—have been segregated and forced to live behind a walled
ghettos so that they don't mix with the humans and provide them with Haze—the
drug their bite provides. Thought they've been promised food and essentials,
they're left to live in horrible conditions slowly dying from the deadly Wrath
virus. When a new form of the drug called Golden Haze makes its way to the
humans and they start to die, the streets of Black City will tremble again with
the talk of another war.
Ash Fisher is the only half-blood
Darkling allowed to live inside the wall. He's always felt out of place among
the humans, what with not having a heartbeat and all that, until the day he
meets the girl with the cornflower blue eyes and his heart flutters for the
first time in his life. After her father is killed by one, Natalie Buchanan firmly
believes Darklings to be monsters, but as she gets to know Ash her beliefs will
crumble and her heart will be shaken. The only problem is that human and
Darkling relationships are a capital offence, and the punishment is death.
War, oppression, lies, fanatic and
religion, forbidden love, the Wrath virus, and a million other things make Black City one of the coolest dystopian
debuts this year. Elizabeth Richard manages to bring back the vampires of old—fang baring, blood-drinking, burning
in the sun vamps—with creative twists that makes them her own. The different
breeds of Darklings were both beautiful and terrifying. The punishment for associating with them was
horrifying and heartbreaking. This fast paced, action packed story of forbidden
love full of shocking twists and turns will leave begging for more!
The only reason I give this a 3 out of
5 is for the times where I found the dialogue a bit too stiff, almost as if the
characters were reading the lines instead of saying what they wanted to say. I
also found myself wishing some scenes to be drawn out more, to let the emotions
that I was feeling run a bit deeper instead of just cutting to the chase and
moving on. But overall I found this to be an amazing debut and a great addition
to my favorite YA dystopian novels!
*I received
this ARC from the publisher*
Favorite Quotes:
~Tracker
training in pitch black room~
My
fingers brush over her smooth skin, running past the dimple on her left cheek
before finding the soft fullness of her lips.
"Ash," she sighs, tilting
her head up.
Her lips touch mine. They barely make
contact, but a force like a lightning bolt shoots through them and straight
into my heart. An explosion of pain erupts inside my chest. Natalie stumbles
back, and I know she's as stunned as I am because that's when I feel it:
A second heartbeat pounding inside my
chest.
