Review: Pawn by Aimee Carter

YOU CAN BE A VII. IF YOU GIVE UP EVERYTHING.

For Kitty Doe, it seems like an easy choice. She can either spend her life as a III in misery, looked down upon by the higher ranks and forced to leave the people she loves, or she can become a VII and join the most powerful family in the country.

If she says yes, Kitty will be Masked—surgically transformed into Lila Hart, the Prime Minister's niece, who died under mysterious circumstances. As a member of the Hart family, she will be famous. She will be adored. And for the first time, she will matter.

There's only one catch. She must also stop the rebellion that Lila secretly fostered, the same one that got her killed …and one Kitty believes in. Faced with threats, conspiracies and a life that's not her own, she must decide which path to choose—and learn how to become more than a pawn in a twisted game she's only beginning to understand.

ebook, 346 pages

Expected publication: November 26th 2013 by Harlequin Teen

(info grabbed from GoodReads)

This is the second series I’ve read by Aimee Carter and was very excited before reading PAWN to see how she could do a dystopian.  The concepts for each series are so different that I was very intrigued to see how that would be handled.  I am glad to say that PAWN is very different from THE GODDESS TEST series.  Where THE GODDESS TEST was light and magical, PAWN is dark and realistic, while still having the same spark I’ve come to expect from Aimee Carter’s writing.  It’s a very different turn for this author, but I really like it. 

Dystopian usually revolves the choices a character makes that ultimately start to the dissolve the society.  PAWN is a bit different.  In this story, Kitty is very much at the whims of everyone around her.  This installment of THE BLACKCOAT REBELLION series has Kitty reacting to her predicament time and again; the story is propelled by events around the character rather than the character herself.  While this is normally a bad thing, the way the story flows in PAWN made it less exhausting to read than in other books.  I appreciated it more as something that made the novel different rather than it being a negative.  However, it will be interesting to see in the sequel how Kitty will start to make her own decisions more and how that will affect things.

The way Aimee Carter writes actually feels like it’s coming out of a teenager’s head.  I was worried that Kitty would turn into another Kate; same character with a different name.  Kitty has similarities with Kate, but is definitely a separate character.  She is more… severe.  They are both stubborn and want to do what’s right, but Kitty has more guts.  She is brave and will do whatever it takes to get her out alive.  Kitty has a strength and potential that Kate didn’t have, and her actions and thoughts made sense for a girl living in the world of PAWN. 

The world of PAWN is filled with cruelty that sometimes pushed my limits of what was believable for an entire society.  But at the same time, stranger things have happened in real life.  I love that dystopian literature reminds us not to forget what people are capable of when they have power.  Aimee Carter pushed the limits of what I had ever thought about and I loved it.  Set in a world that’s a mash of Marie Lu’s LEGEND and George Orwell’s 1984, PAWN is a fresh take on dystopian I recommend for all lovers of the genre.

Final Thought: 24 out of 28 toadstools

This review is also posted on GoodReads