This book has gotten a bad rap on Goodreads, and I don’t think it’s deserved. The premise is killer. The writing is competent and flows nicely. The plot is fast and the characters are full of secrets. I really liked it – it’s sci fi candy and I gobbled it right up.

The 100 refers to a group of people – juvenile delinquents who have been sent to re-colonize an irradiated Earth. Humanity has been living on space stations for generations, ever since the Earth became uninhabitable. But their resources are dwindling, and the adult scientists need to know if Earth is truly ready for habitation again. The teens will be the test subjects.

“Juvenile delinquent” in this future world is a fuzzy term. Crime is punished very severely, and almost anything is a crime. Adults who commit crimes are usually executed immediately. Minors are kept in “Confinement” until they turn 18, and are then given a retrial. Except the retrials are mostly shams and the teens are usually then executed as well. So for the teens who know what’s likely coming, they look at the trip to Earth as a reprieve from death.

We get the story from four different third-person perspectives – two girls, two boys. They range in age from 17 to 20 (or thereabouts). They’re Confined and/or sent to Earth for various reasons, though one of our POVs actually stays behind on one of the space stations, giving us more insight into that environment and the Earth experiment from the adults’ perspective. Each of the characters has a secret (some have more than one); some secrets are easier to guess than others. The secrets are revealed in flashbacks, which I normally loathe, but they work well here – they’re short and full of action, just like the present-day sections.

What irritates a lot of the reviewers is something that happens very near the end. We realize something one of the main characters did, and it’s monumentally stupid. Not just “I can’t believe I did that, that was so stupid” stupid. I mean that it really strains credulity. Breaks it, even. It certainly broke a lot of other readers. It didn’t ruin it for me, though. I gave it a bit of a side-eye, sure. But I figured I was so far down the rabbit hole of believability, this one further step wasn’t going to ruin my enjoyment. And it’s followed very closely by another revelation that I found quite believable and sets the book up nicely for a sequel, which I will certainly be reading.

So, world-building. There’s not much of it. If you want a lot of world-building that’s creative and makes sense and actually uses science that maybe, possibly could exist in the future, look elsewhere. This is not your book. If you have a very, very healthy ability to suspend your disbelief and prefer to digest your sci-fi at a breakneck pace, you might consider giving this a shot.

This is an Alloy (book packager) title, and it feels like it. It bears a lot in common with a few other packaged titles I’ve read – short chapters, multiple characters (often multiple POVs), lots of secrets that are teased out over time, an emphasis on plot, a concept that can be described in a snappy sentence or two. What surprised me is that the author essentially acknowledges that it’s a packaged title in the Acknowledgments (see what I did there?), at least in the arc version. She credits the idea for the story to someone else in the first sentence, and thanks several people, mentioning Alloy specifically, later on. As someone who looks for these sorts of things, this obviously caught my eye. I wonder how many teens 1. read the Acknowledgments, and 2. would care one way or another.

The CW has picked up this as a midseason premiere and I’m excited to have a look. I hope it’s as fun as the book.

Review copy picked up at Kidlitcon.