While the story is intriguing, the dystopian plot seemed like a recycled mix of other recent YA dystopian works like The Young World. Too many plot points and characters seemed to be contrived to check boxes of “edgy” works (LGBTQ issues? Check. Girl saving the day? Check. Untrustworthy adults? Check. Environmental calamities? Check. And so on). Side note – why did the girl have to cut her hair and become masculine looking in order to exercise authority? And at the end she capitulated that she shouldn’t be in charge and her younger brother took action. That’s not really the message I want girls seeing in literature.

I was engaged in the story, but I found the artwork to be distracting. Most parts of the artwork are done in black, white and pink, which was not the issue. The art seemed super-oversimplified and with the one brother looking like a character out of an old episode of Speed Racer and the sister with a nose oddly drawn like the characters from an old episode of The Twilight Zone (the one who has the surgery to be beautiful). The story and art should be complementary, and in this book, they felt too much in competition with one another or incongruous.
Thank you NetGalley for this ARC.