Dualed by Elsie Chapman (Galley)
Release Date: February 26, 2013
Genre: Fiction, young adult, dystopia, action, can we get a reboot?
Rating: 2.99 out of 5 stars
Summary: Meet West, a teen who picked the wrong time to have an identity crisis, because in Kersh there are two versions of you, you and your Alt, but only one is allowed to live. If you don’t eliminate your Alt in the 31-day time span, you both will die. Sure you can hire a Striker to kill your target for you, but that’s against the rules in this modern take on natural selection. Who truly deserves to live if your Alt is the better you, and how can a world survive where the only people who live to adulthood are murderers? Most of these questions will definitely not be answered in Dualed. That’s what sequels are for.
As a reader, I would like to petition the ability to make reboots for books. If the movie industry can do it (again and again and again), I don’t see why I, as a hypothetical millionaire in this situation, shouldn’t be able to purchase the rights of a book series and let a different author give the story justice. Public domain be damned, that nonsense takes far too long and just ends up resulting in a glut of repetitive books in the publishing world. I’m looking at you Pride and Platypus!
After learning about Dualed during a panel at this year’s New York Comic Con, I knew I had to read it. A dystopic society where you must kill an alternate version of yourself before they kill you? “Sign me up!” I recall thinking, even though my brain’s initial response was probably more like, “Cool.” Which is why I immediately jumped on a chance to receive a galley of the inventive novel. Unfortunately, while its premise is strong and the world in which it resides in is a rich one, the good stops there. Due to a lack of relate-able characters and completely ignoring the ramifications of murder, Dualed is one novel that had so much potential, but ended up stabbing itself in the back.
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Tags: action, dystopia, fiction, young adult
