Published by Imprint on July 3rd, 2018
Genre: Thriller
Pages: 288
Format: eARC
Source: Publisher
Goodreads
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What Brynn Caldwell can’t remember might get her killed.YA thrillers are kind of my go-to genre when I need something quick to grab me and distract me for a little while. I love unraveling their mysteris and figuring out their culprits and motives. So while I hadn't heard anything about Shadow State around the blogosphere, I was still happy to read it when I found it while perusing NetGalley. It's a solid story with some exciting twists and turns, but having read so much of the genre, I didn't feel like it was at all the perfect book.
Brynn is a promising science student recovering from a bad relationship that sent her spiraling into depression. But as she puts the pieces of her life back together, a few don’t fit.
Brynn is uncovering memories of being abducted and possibly brainwashed. It’s all connected to a drug that might be an ultimate weapon: a tool to control people’s memories. Now, to stop a possible terrorist attack, Brynn has to find out what she’s been forced to forget—and what side she’s really on.
To start with, though, I really, really liked the idea. The whole premise surrounds this drug called Cortexia that the main character's mother created, a miracle cure for PTSD. There are a lot of players here, from the lab scientists, to the government, to protesters. I thought this was realy interesting and not something I had seen in YA before. Corporate and political thrillers are just very hard to come by. The main character quickly learns that underneath the shiny veneer of Cortexia and its creators, BioXin, something is amiss. Cortexia may not be the miracle cure that everyone says it is, and her mother might even be behind the cover-up that Brynn has discovered.
The plot relies a lot on Brynn's memory loss, which I found incredibly frustrating. Brynn has basically no memeory of the past summer, no recollection of her ex-boyfriend's face even, or why she and her closest, dearest friend no longer speak. And Brynn and her current boyfriend, Dex, act like this is totally normal. They are very casual about her having absolutely no idea what happened between like March and September. It was very bizarre and I thought it was ridiculous that there were no connections made regarding this point and WHY it was happening. It was so obvious to me from page like, 1, what was going on there. So watching the characters sloooowly figure out something that I already knew really took away from the reading experience.
I predicted a good amount of the plot points in this story, which isn't unusual for me, but it is disappointing. I enjoyed a good amount of the red herrings though, and thought the author did a really great job of building tension between a few of the characters. Everyone was suspicious and everyone was in danger. I found the big reveal to be a little convoluted, especially with regards to the motive, and I didn't think the Bad Guy could have really predicted Brynn would take every single step the way she did. But the very end? Like the last couple sentences? Absolutely excellent and left me with my jaw hanging in the wind.
So, I don't think this is the perfect mystery for long-time thriller readers. But it's exciting and unique enough that I would definitely recommend it to others. It's political and creepy and tense at all the right moments, even if it had some predictable plot points and a confusing Big Reveal.
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