Review: Never Fade

Never Fade by Alexandra Bracken
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It feels pretty normal for me to read an Alexandra Bracken book and find it to be rather longer than it should be, because while it's not lacking in the action, it's also padded with tons of narrative dead air and static that pushes it to a brick-like 500-page length. Normally, I'm the one person who thinks duologies are for no, but maybe in the case of The Darkest Minds and sequels, there should've been only one sequel. Hell, the last 50-100 pages or so of this book could be combined with a good chunk of In the Afterlight to make a single epic novel.

That said, though, as long and slow as this book tends to be, it's also scarily topical, especially today. Even four years after this book first hit shelves, it's so much more relevant when we can fully expect that the current creeper sitting in the White House (you know I refuse to call him by the title he claims to command) will try to ape President Gray, particularly in those final stretches of this book. Though at least Gray actually puts on an air of decorum in the process - which makes him, scarily enough, a little more like a certain creeper claiming to be #2 in the executive branch.

It's those last stretches of the book, when there's too many cliffhangers to count, that are the reason why I give this book a four-star rating. That relatively tiny portion of the book alone. That's how terrific it is.

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