Inside Out (An Inside Story, #1)

by Maria V Snyder

I’m Trella. I’m a scrub. A nobody. One of thousands who work the lower levels, keeping Inside clean for the Uppers. I just do my job and try to avoid the Population Control Police, who dream of recycling scrubs into fertiliser. So what if I occasionally use the pipes to sneak around the Upper levels?It’s not like it’s dangerous…

Well, turns out it is. Because I know every corridor, pipe and shortcut I’ve become the go-to girl to lead a revolution. I know if we find a gateway to Outside it’ll be suicide plain and simple. But guess who likes a challenge?

I should have just said no…

• ISBN10: 0778304116
• ISBN13: 9780778304111
• Publish Date: 7 January 2011 (first published 1 January 2010)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 25 October 2014
• Publish Country: CA
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: Mira Ink
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 336
• Language: English
• URL: http://harpercollins.co.uk

Reviews

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To start off this book was different to what I expected. I guess I mean plot wise, or world wise? When I read the blurb I had imagined a different world to what this book was set in. So I was disappointed to find that the world was exactly what the blurb hints at but doesn’t quite say. I was disappointed in that respect but I was not disappointed in how this book turned out.

I liked that the story was interesting, the idea of travelling through the air ducts and heating pipes in a world where no one knows anything different than the place they live in was interesting.

The only thing was that at times I couldn’t picture what was going on because there was no clear description of events or surroundings so I found myself wondering how things happened because I had pictured them in a different surrounding. That got annoying when ever I came across it and I came across it way too often. This happened at the end. I wasn’t sure what was going on because the description just wasn’t clear, people disappeared because I couldn’t pin point what happened to them in the scene as we weren’t really told. It was a huge scene at the end with lots of people but I felt like most of those people were just standing around watching the events taking place because the author didn’t tell us what they were really doing. Writing like this just really annoys me. How editors (and writers) get away with it or think that it’s a style of writing are just crazy. It pulled me out of the story and annoyed me so much it lowered my rating for this book. By one whole club. And since I don’t do halves in ratings it has to be something huge that makes me lower or raise the rating.

Other than that, I enjoyed this book. I didn’t really love it or anything and Trella’s stubbornness got to the point where I was yelling at the book in anger and started to think she is just plain stupid, but I still enjoyed it. The way it ended has made me want to read the second book though, so I shall do that at some point. I just hope it is written way better than this one.

If I were to separate the rating into sup-plots it would be something like this:

Writing: ♣
Character development: ♣♣
World creation: ♣♣♣♣
Plot: ♣♣♣
Enjoyment: ♣♣♣

The writing isn’t so bad that it’s hard to read with grammar and spelling mistakes. It’s actually really easy to read minus descriptions. It’s just the whole having no idea what’s going on thing was really annoying and very surprising.

Miss J
x

[Amber]

Having never read any of Maria V Snyder’s works in the past, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this book when I bought it from Amazon. However, what I found was an epic dystopian novel packed with a fast paced plot and fun, interesting and well developed characters.

The world in which the novel is set was brilliantly described by Snyder, and I felt so absorbed in the book it was as if I was actually there in the Inside, living through Trella’s eyes. There was history behind everything, and I loved delving deeper and deeper and learning so much about the scrubs and the uppers. The division of the classes was brilliantly done, along with the descriptions of the levels and just the Inside in general.

Trella, our main protagonist, is a scrub who lives on the lower levels, earning her living through cleaning the pipes that are all over the Inside. She’s a fantastic main character, I really loved her voice and her personality, and I felt she was the perfect choice to lead a rebellion against those who control her. Usually I dislike female lead characters as they tend to have a very annoying voice, and are extremely whiney. However, Trella has neither of those equalities which is why I loved her.

As with every teenage novel, Trella also has a love interest whose name is Riley. Their connection is clear from the start, and Riley was a great character and was fun to read about.

There were plenty of secondary characters, which would normally be overwhelming, but Snyder pulls it off very well and I found it easy to differentiate between all of the minor characters, and they each had their own distinctive personality. My favourite secondary character was Jacy, and although we didn’t see as much of him as I would have liked, I was kind of ‘shipping him and Trella. *Grin*

The ending was a huge surprise, which I did not see coming, and it left me wanting so much more! Luckily I had a galley of the second book, Outside In, waiting for me to open and start reading!