Book Review: The 100 by Kass Morgan

The 100

Author:  Kass Morgan
Publisher:  Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 336 pages
Expected Publication Date:  September 3, 2013

From Goodreads:
In the future, humans live in city-like spaceships orbiting far above Earth's toxic atmosphere. No one knows when, or even if, the long-abandoned planet will be habitable again. But faced with dwindling resources and a growing populace, government leaders know they must reclaim their homeland... before it's too late.

Now, one hundred juvenile delinquents are being sent on a high-stakes mission to recolonize Earth. After a brutal crash landing, the teens arrive on a savagely beautiful planet they've only seen from space. Confronting the dangers of this rugged new world, they struggle to form a tentative community. But they're haunted by their past and uncertain about the future. To survive, they must learn to trust - and even love - again.

Review:
Sci-fi?  Check.  Romance?  Check.  

The book is told from four different POVs:  Clarke, Wells, Bellamy, and Glass.  Two guys, two girls.  Three of the four are sent to Earth while the fourth stays on the spaceship.  The Colony (the spaceship) has very strict rules and the 100 sent to Earth are all in jail for really small things (for the most part).  Stealing, that sort of thing.  And the penalty is death, they just have to wait until they turn eighteen.  Then apparently they have a retrial, but it's a sham, and then they are executed.  So the book starts with Clarke finding out that they are sending 100 of them to Earth, to make sure that it is safe and then if it is, they all will go back (it's been about 300 years since Earth became uninhabitable for some reason).

I really enjoyed this book, but I definitely have questions.  Obviously they're living on a spaceship and have been for about 300 years, so it seems weird that they wouldn't have the technology to send a probe or something to find out if there is radiation instead of sending people, even if they don't care about them.  Oh well.

Learning about life on the spaceship was interesting, so I was glad one POV was from someone who stayed.  I also had questions about that as well.  More explanation could have been given about the strict rules (it's about resources, but still).  Also, why did they set things up the way they did?  There appear to be three different parts of the ship, with one part being the rich part, Phoenix, and then the other parts being poor, and they even have different accents, which didn't make sense to me because you could just walk from one part to the other in a few minutes and they seemed to interact a lot.  So why different accents?

The characters were definitely interesting.  They all had secrets, which were revealed slowly through the book, through flashbacks, which was nicely done.  Why had they been confined--what was their "crime"?  And Wells...I really felt for him, but he made the most horrible decisions.  One after the other.  I'm still rooting for him, but still.  

The book ends with a huge cliffhanger (of course!)  Even though there were a couple of things that bothered me about the book, I loved it.  I couldn't put it down.  

And it will be a new TV series mid-season.  From the trailer I saw, there are definitely differences that I noticed, including characters in the TV series that are not in the book at all.  Here is a link to a post about the series:  New TV YA Series based on new book series! The 100


                           Posted by:  Pam