Arclight by Josin McQuein REVIEW

The world has changed, taken over by creatures called the Fade. Though they were once human, their bodies have been taken over by parasites and now control all but one small compound of Earth, The Arclight. Light is the only thing that that the Fade are afraid of, allergic to even as anytime they enter the light they seem to decompose and turn to ash. That is what the Arclight is, walls of light. Lights shine up from the ground, and down from streetlights in a blinding wall of light that encircles the remains of humanity. No one ventures out past the light, until a blip on the radar shows human activity in the Gray, an area between the light and the dark. A group of men sets out to try and save her, nearly all of them losing their lives to the Fade, but the human girl is saved. Marina wakes up in the Arclight hospital, no memory of who she is, who where she came from, but a girl who survived the Dark and wasn’t killed by the Fade must be someone special. Many believe that she holds the key to taking back the world and restoring her humanity, but others mistrust her. The Fade begin trying to attack the Arclight with renewed frenzy, and people whisper that Marina must be working with them helping them to take down the last of the humans.

It is in one of these attacks that a Fade actually breaks into the Arclight. No one can understand how he manages it, but Marina can hear his thoughts and feel his feelings. When she is in the room he stops trying to fight, and simply looks at her. Marina knows that she should remember something, but she doesn’t know what or how she is connected to the Fade. All she knows is that the friends she has made since coming to the Arclight are in danger as long as she stays there. When the Fade breaks out, she agrees to leave with him and go into the Dark as long as no one from the Arclight is hurt. What she didn’t expect was her friends to come into the Dark after her, or what the dark has of her memories.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit. It was a mix of Andrew Fukuda’s The Hunt and David Simpson’s Post-Human trilogy. So often post-apocalyptic sci-fi books make little to no scene on how the world became what it is, but this book leaves little to no wholes. The story flows well, and my friends and I had a great time predicting what we thought would happen next and making up theories along the way (I am happy to say I was correct on all accounts). While it seems that this book is going to be a series, it can also stay on its own. I am satisfied with the ending, and while I liked this book, I liked the ending enough that I don’t plan on reading anything else. I would probably give it 4.5 stars only because I was bugged by the main characters best friend, other than that it is a great novel.