Trigg and Ren are brother and sister living in an abusive home with their father. One night he begins to beat Trigg so badly, after hitting Ren as well, that both siblings believe this will be the end of Trigg’s life. Instead Ren takes matters into her own hands and as a result the 2 siblings steal their dad’s car and are arrested and put in a prison known as 101. Few to no details are know about this prison, only that it houses the “worst of the worst” offenders. The governmental party in power is known as the NAO (New Age Order) and the trial the siblings is given is a farce as are the prison facilities.
SPOLIER ALERT*The government rules with an iron fist, Trigg was senteneced to 3 years for Grand Theft, and Ren is sentenced to 25 years for attempted murder. END SPOILER ALERT
One of the interesting things about this prison is that it is made up of small townhomes, each housing approximately 3-4 inmates. The men and women are segregated, but not fenced off so they can socialize. There is no curfew, or any other laws regulating inmates behavior. The hope of the NAO is that the inmates will kill one another, or at least give the guards a reason to kill them.
Trigg’s main concern is to find Ren and protect her, however he doesn’t find her for almost a month and during that time she has gone through hell. However she is resilient; and manages to help Trigg and his group of other inmates try and topple Ace, who is the absolute worst inmate around. Seeing him in my mind SPOLIER ALERT* kill both Dane’s girl and Billy Jo END SPOILER ALERT was enough to make me hate even more than I already did. I enjoyed seeing Trigg finally beat the crap out of him. I would have done even more knowing what had happened to his sister.
While reading the book it was easy to get caught up in the characters. I felt like Chatwin did a good job or developing her characters, so it was easy to understand where they were coming from. The only character that I noticed being slightly underdeveloped was Ren. While she started out with a good beginning development, I thought Ren wasn’t as fully rounded as Trigg and some of the other characters.
The ending was truly a shock for me, I anticipated the prison outcome. But, I had no idea what the actual ending for Trigg and Ren would be. I think Chatwin does an excellent job of interweaving themes of governmental control/secrets, love, and taking a stand even when it means your life simply because it is the right thing to do.
I didn’t notice many grammatical errors, which contributed to the overall enjoyment of the book. However, I did notice sequential numbers throughout the book, almost as if Chatwin wrote an outline and forgot to take the numbers out once she fleshed the book out. I don’t know if this is a result of reading a pdf on my nook, but I’ve never seen this in any other pdf books or documents. However, there’s a first time for everything. Hopefully, it’s just something that showed up on my nook as a result of the pdf file; because that did detract from the book. It would break up sentences & leave pages half blank.
Overall, I would give this a solid 3 stars, and some people will probably think it is deserving of 4+ stars. Had it been a trilogy like the Hunger games where you really see the characters develop and go through paradigm shifts then I could myself a higher rating. Trigg and Ren didn’t change all that much considering what they went through. Granted, Trigg did learn to finally fight back physically, and mentally plan strategic attacks. However, their personalities & outlook on life I thought stayed the same throughout the book. What led them to prison, however wrongly were the same characteristics that put them there in the first place due to their dealing with their father.
I do look forward to reading for of Chatwin’s work, she is a talented author.
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