Perfect Ruin (Internment Chronicles, #1)

by Lauren DeStefano

[Briana @ Pages Unbound]

I was not a huge fan of Lauren DeStefano’s Wither, due to poor world building and character development. However, I decided I was willing to give her new series a try, starting with Perfect Ruin. Unfortunately, I didn’t end up liking Perfect Ruin either, and I’m not sure this is even one of those books where I can say the premise was good but the execution was off—because there barely is a premise.

There’s a floating city where the citizens are never allowed to leave to see the earth below. So, a girl wants to get off the city. And that’s pretty much it. There isn’t a lot of motivation behind the desire either, besides her personal daydreams of seeing more of the world, which hardly seems worth risking major bodily harm or death for. Political problems and corruption are implied, but are generally saved for later in the series. I think including everything in one novel, instead of trying to stretch an already thin plot over multiple books, could have improved Perfect Ruin immensely.

As it is the pacing is simply too slow for the majority of the book, and then ultimately too fast. The story opens with the protagonist Morgan spending a couple hundred pages dreaming of getting off her floating city. Only then does action happen, but then it’s too sudden, too late, and too rushed to fit properly into the remaining pages of the book. The end result is that it seems forced and unrealistic. Add to the unremarkable plot the fact that Morgan is a rather unremarkable main character…and there isn’t much to say about the book. I do like that there are some implications that Morgan has some type of social anxiety, but the narrative doesn’t make a point of drawing attention to it. She handles herself and lives her life as best as possible, tackling difficult situations as they come.

Overall, however, I was just really bored with this book. It reads as if the idea for a great opening scene of a novel was made to stretch over hundreds of pages, and then the main part of the plot never happened. I won’t be reading the rest of the series.