Book Review: Pure

If you've been following this blog for long, you know that I love books. Pure is one of the books I got for my last birthday, and the first one that I decided to read because it looked so interesting. It did not disappoint--it was very interesting, and also a little harrowing, but one that makes you think. Julianna Baggott's Pure is a look at a post-apocalyptic world. "The Detonations" are a time referred to often in the novel, with time marked as either Before or After. The Before would look mighty familiar to you and me, but The After isn't anything I'd want to see in real life. It was a little harrowing. In the Pure world, there are basically two groups of people. Those who live out among the gray, flattened landscape, and those who live in The Dome high above it all. The Dome was protected, and those who live inside are Pure. Those "wretches" who lived outside The Dome have been scarred in one way or another--physically and in other ways--by the destruction of The Detonations. One of the most harrowing parts of the novel is the descriptions of the fusings. The wretches suffer by having been fused to whatever or whoever they may have been near when The Detonations occurred. The heroine of the novel, a now sixteen-year-old Pressia, has a doll head fist because she was a five-year-old holding a doll when the destruction hit. Another boy in the novel was giving his little brother a piggy-back ride, so they are now fused together in a permanent piggy-back ride and if one dies, they both die. Those in The Dome are a mystery to those outside of it, and vice-versa. The people in The Dome are looking to the time when the earth regenerates and they can rule a new world. The wretches distrust those in The Dome, even believing they may have been responsible for The Detonations. They may be right. One teenage boy from The Dome, Partridge, a Pure, escapes and heads out into the world of wretches and bands with them to help bring about a possible revolution. Pure is the first novel of a trilogy, with the second, Fuse, due out in February 2013.