Confessions of a Literary Addict

This review is spoiler-free!

The Thousandth Floor by Katharine McGee
Series: The Thousandth Floor #1
Genres: Dystopia, Young Adult
Release Date: August 30th 2016 by HarperCollins
Format: Hardcover, 437 pages
Rating: ★★★☆☆
Find it here: Goodreads || Book Depository

New York City as you’ve never seen it before.

A thousand-story tower stretching into the sky. A glittering vision of the future, where anything is possible—if you want it enough.

Welcome to Manhattan, 2118.

A hundred years in the future, New York is a city of innovation and dreams. But people never change: everyone here wants something…and everyone has something to lose.

Leda Cole’s flawless exterior belies a secret addiction—to a drug she never should have tried and a boy she never should have touched.

Eris Dodd-Radson’s beautiful, carefree life falls to pieces when a heartbreaking betrayal tears her family apart.

Rylin Myers’s job on one of the highest floors sweeps her into a world—and a romance—she never imagined…but will her new life cost Rylin her old one?

Watt Bakradi is a tech genius with a secret: he knows everything about everyone. But when he’s hired to spy by an upper-floor girl, he finds himself caught up in a complicated web of lies.

And living above everyone else on the thousandth floor is Avery Fuller, the girl genetically designed to be perfect. The girl who seems to have it all—yet is tormented by the one thing she can never have.

Amid breathtaking advancement and high-tech luxury, five teenagers struggle to find their place at the top of the world. But when you’re this high up, there’s nowhere to go but down…

This… was a strange one. The idea was really cool, and the reason this book got three stars at all, but the execution and a certain plot point were just. Weird.

Well, okay. Boring might be a better word for the plot execution. I didn’t care a lick about rich kids being rich kids and all their problems, nor did I care much for the poor people they were basically tossing around as they pleased (though, I guess, it’s not quite presented like that, but the class system was both blatantly obvious and painfully referenced left and right). In fact, the only part I cared about was the first scene, which was actually the last scene of the book. That part was interesting! Alas, it took a whole lot of boring to get there.

As for the certain plot point… that was more flat out uncomfortable to handle. It’s a spoiler, so I won’t be the one to talk about it, but I have no doubt someone has mentioned it in a review elsewhere, so feel free to track one down if you’d like to know. It’s very uncomfortable, in my opinion, but it admittedly did fit the vibe of “these tower kids are all hella fucked up, watch this” that was basically the entire concept of the novel itself.

Another small issue I had was how difficult it was for me to keep the characters straight at first. Sure, that’s more of a me problem, but there were so may of them, and I couldn’t really get attached to any of them before I was being shuffled along to the next, and then before I knew it I was done the book. I’m assuming they’ll stay for the next installments, so at least I’ll already be familiar with them now that I can tell them apart, but, yeah. Not the easiest thing keeping track of not only five main characters but a large slew of secondary characters, of which a handful are pretty vital to the plot itself and need to be kept an eye on. It was hard!

I will admit, with that ending, I’m very intrigued with how the next book (and then the third book, since it’s a trilogy?) is going to go. I’m hoping for some fallout in addition to some more fleshing out of plot points that were given to us in this first book, because a few things were kind of tossed out and not everyone involved got full repercussions for their actions, and I’d like to see more of how it affects the characters involved. There’s also still a lot of room for some wild things to go down, I’m sure, so I’m curious as to what the author is going to toss at us next. Onward I go!

Thanks for reading!