Inside Out

Inside Out by Maria V Snyder

Harlequin Teen, 2010

315 pages

YA; Dystopian

1st in series; Second book Outside In due next year.

Source: Bought

Summary: Trella is a scrub, a worker, a loner, a nobody. She has one friend and he happens to believe in a better future. When a prophet shows up, Trella is roped in to assisting him, mostly because she wants to prove him wrong. But her search leads her deeper in to her world and sparks a revolution.

Thoughts: I've loved Snyder's work since I read Poison Study so I'm excited to finally get my hands on this book especially because I've seen ecstatic reviews of it around the blogosphere.

I think one of the things I enjoy most about dystopian fiction is the mystery aspect. I love mysteries, as you can see in my reviews, even if I'm not good at solving them. There are lots of questions here. How did people end up in this box and what exactly are the divisions separating scrubs and uppers? What is the power structure? How will they figure everything out? What will happen in the second book???

Trella was a prickly character. She knows the pipes that help run the Inside but beyond her one friend Cog, she avoids people as much as she can. But she still believes in something more and she grows in her interactions with people tremendously. At the start of the book she would say she has one friend; by the end, I think she'd have difficulty counting all of the people she cares about. Her family issues are another of the questions explored; she has a different background than most of the other scrubs.

I also really liked the other characters:Riley, an upper who befriends her; Cog, her best friend; Logan and Anne-Jade, tech savvy people who assist; even the villains, Commander Karla and knife-happy Vinco.

Overall: I think if you like Snyder's previous work you will like this too. I think this would also work as an introduction to her writing so 4.5/5. Unfortunately I now have to wait probably at least a year for the second one.

Cover: I think the girl looks kind of like Miley Cyrus. I've seen some Miley hate but I don't share in it so I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Her blue eyes are important for the story.