(Age suggestion: 14 and up for sexual content and mild swearing)
Summary: This books is set in a future where teen suicide is an international epidemic. It follows the life of a young girl named Sloane, who hides her depression, much like a lot of the other students in her school, in order to escape The Program, a treatment proven to prevent suicide and depression by taking away your memories. With her brother gone, the only people she has left are her few friends and boyfriend James, who is just as unstable as she is. Constantly under surveillance; Sloane and James try their hardest to escape the pain they feels, but both her and James know that you can’t do this forever. Can they avoid The Program or will they lose all they have ever known trying? 
At first I didn’t think I would like the book that much. The beginning was a bit slow, and the writing a bit too weak, but then I was hooked. I successfully finished the book in one day by speeding through all of my schoolwork, so I had “free time” during class, and although I should, I do not regret it. The message is a very important one; your actions affect others. It shows that suicide can lead to other people’s depression. Although the message was masked and covered by unnecessary sex scenes and simplistic writing; I appreciated it being there. Because it was subtle, you aren’t overwhelmed with the heavy topic as much as you could be. Don’t get me wrong, the book is incredibly sad, but it is also quite beautiful in the way she writes. Suzanne Young never uses big or grandiose words that you can’t understand, she uses words every normal 17-year-old would and gets straight to the point. All of the characters are well developed, even the ones that weren’t in the novel for a long time. Although I hated the character James, he was well developed and I see why he could be well liked. I thought he was arrogant, cocky and overly sexual, to the point where I was uncomfortable with how he acted towards Sloane. On the lighter side of things, I absolutely loved the character Realm, a funny and charming boy Sloane meets, who becomes a very complex and important character in the novel. Sloane was also a very interesting character who I connected to in some ways because she was sort of shy but also very strong minded, stubborn and sarcastic. The book was a great length and was a very easy read, but was still equally important as any 700-plus paged novel I’ve read. The only complaint I have is that there was a lot of unnecessary sex scenes in it, which I got uncomfortable reading on the city bus and in class, because I feared a teacher or even a friend would start to read over my shoulder at the wrong time. Other than that I really can’t complain. The book was great and definitely not one of your stereotypical teen novels.
