Title: Dark Inside (Dark Inside #1)
Author: Jeyn Roberts
Publisher: Simon & Schuster BFYR
Release Date: November 1, 2011
Source: ARC from Publisher
Buy the Book: Amazon / Book Depository / Indigo
An ancient evil has been unleashed, and it is turning friends into murderous strangers. For those who survive the brutal earthquakes and the first wave of the killing, the world is a different, deadlier place. Society has fallen apart. No one can be trusted. For four teens struggling to stay alive in a world determined to kill them, it means all they have is one another--if they can trust one another--and the hope that their future holds something greater than mere survival.
These days there are a very high number of dystopian and post-apocalyptic books being published, but never books that take place during the actual apocalypse. That's where Dark Inside comes in. Jeyn Roberts wrote an incredible story about the world as we know it ending.
Mason, Aries, Clementine and Michael were each leading perfectly normal lives and going about their own business on the day that the earthquakes happened. And when the earthquakes ended, they witnessed first hand the change that happened in some people and the horrible violence that ensued. Each teenager is trying to survive in their own way and understand what triggered people to become violent monsters, but nothing really seems to make sense to anyone anymore. As all the teenagers make their way west toward Vancouver, they meet others also trying to survive and together they hope for the best. But every step of the way, those monsters with black veins in their eyes are there to try and stop them. If they stick together they may just be able to survive the apocalypse.
I don't think words can even begin to describe how amazing Dark Inside was. Like I already said, there are so many books written that take place after the apocalypse happened, but never any that take place during the actual apocalypse. It was just so entirely different from everything I have read this year and I absolutely loved it. I just never knew what was going to happen next, but not in the usual way because everything was completely new and different. What I liked most about the book was that it was told from the point of view of four different teenagers who survived the apocalypse. It really added an element of suspense to the story.
There were a lot of characters in this book so it made it quite difficult to connect with any of them. Though the main characters, the one whose points of view the story was told from were Mason, Aries, Clementine and Michael. These characters were all very different from one another and they didn't really come together until the end of the book. The four main characters also really surprised me. I never really thought that Aries would become the leader she became or that Clementine would be the fighter and survivor that she ended up being. As for the two boys, I never thought that Mason would push through the pain and not give up and that Michael would react the way he did in different situations. But what I loved most about all of these characters was the way they all came together to survive and work together to figure out what was happening to the world.
Overall, Dark Inside was an absolutely fantastic book and Jeyn Roberts is an incredible new writer. She wrote about an apocalypse that felt entirely too real and hopefully won't actually happen any time soon.
