Pure -- 9781455503063

The ideas behind Pure and the world Julianna Baggott created were very interesting. The vehicles through which she showed these things to the reader (Pressia and Partridge, respectively) were natural and well thought out. The writing was mostly good, description and characters were good. It just needed to be better edited and tightened, it came so close to being great. 

A LOT happened, looking back it sometimes felt a bit like she wrote down all these different ideas about things that were possible in this world and things that could happen and then found a way to work ALL of them into the book rather than focusing on a few that moved the plot along or really showed us something about the characters. There were also a few times where the characters figured things out a little too quickly as well as other times where the answers were plainly drawn out and the reader came to the conclusions well before the characters did, in a way that made it seem like it was supposed to have been the other way around. 

There was also a lot of recursive ruminating. This, one could argue, was what made you constantly aware that the characters were all teens --in which case, it worked perfectly. Perhaps if i were also a teen, it wouldn't have felt so repetitive. When these long inner-asides went on though, i just really wanted the feelings to get to the point so we could move on with the story. They didn't always build the tension they were intended to. 

Complaints aside, this is still the best piece of teen science fiction I've read in a really long time. Of course, that might be because I generally can't get past the first few chapters of most science fiction books. But Baggott's skill at crafting sentences overcame much of the aforementioned shortcomings in development. The premise is creative and creepily believable and the world is fully-realized. I just think that the opportunity to create a finely crafted teen novel was so close at hand -- and it's a gaping whole that genre desperately needs filled -- this book just needed some trimming. Pure is still something I would highly recommend to any teen who's looking for something much more substantial than Gossip Girls and who's finished Hunger Games and can't figure out where to turn next.