Manhattan, New York, 2118. Five teenagers struggle to find their place in the world. They all live in a thousand story tower where anything is possible. The five of them all want something but they all have so much more they could lose. Watt Bakradi can find everything about anyone, the perks of being a tech genius. When he is hired by an upper floor girl, he becomes entangled in a web of lies, but the more tangled he gets, the chances of his secret being exposed increase. Eris Dodd-Radson's carefree lifestyle is shattered when a heart-breaking betrayal splits up her family. Leda Cole has an exterior that is perfect but underneath the veneer is an addiction, a boy she should have never gotten involved with and drugs she should have stayed away from. Rylin Myers is eking out a living on the lower floors when a job on one of the highest floors leads her into a world she could have never imagined and a romance she never expected, but she may have to give up her old life to be able to live this new one. Avery Fuller lives above them all on the Thousandth Floor. Designed to be genetically perfect, Avery seems to have it all but she is tortured by the one thing that she can never have. In a world of high-class luxury and technological advancements, these five will have to do their best to fit into the world but it isn't as easy as it seems. After all, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
I didn't really like this book. But I didn't hate it either. I was so confused while I was reading it because I picked it up thinking that it was a dystopian story but then it was just teenagers having problems but in the future. I don't understand why the author would go through with building this world only to write a story about teenage drama and rich kid problems. Why? That's so much energy invested in creating a world that is not even going to have a big impact in the story. I don't get it. The story would have been so much more exciting if there was more to it, especially since this book is set in the future.
I also thought that the book was pretty slow at the beginning. I was about a hundred pages in and I still felt like the story hadn't really gone anywhere. There are two possible reasons as to why I thought it was slow. For one, it may actually be slow. Since there are five main characters and each one needs to be introduced properly, it makes sense that a huge chunk of the first book is just establishing all of the characters and their conflicts. I haven't talked to anyone who has also read this book so I have no idea if I am alone in this opinion or if other people also thought the book is slow as well. The other reason may be because it took me nearly a month to read this book. At one point I was literally reading a chapter a day. Which is a terrible rate, given that the chapters are pretty short. I may have thought that this book is slow because I did not get a chance to read it as often as I would have liked, causing the amount of time that it took me to read it to be stretched out.
Another thing that bothered me (well it was more of a mild irritation but...) I felt like I needed a flow chart to keep track of all the characters. There are five main characters and then there are the minor characters and then there is the fact that not all the main characters know each other on top of which are the relationships between the minor characters and main characters AND the minor characters and other minor characters. Initially it was confusing and every single time that some sort of character relationship was mentioned I had to stop and think about who else knew the characters that were mentioned as well as the mutual connections that they might have.
On a related note, I do have to give props to the author because she made all of her characters important in some way or another. I believe that there are only a handful of minor characters who were not involved in the story or did not have a noticeable impact on the plot. I feel like it is pretty rare for a plot to rely on so many different characters' actions in such an explicit way. I think Katherine McGee has really managed to capture the way that events work in real life. All of the choices made by many different people are what lead up to something happening. It is not always clear even in the real world which actions led actually contributed to the final event. However she managed to show the readers how those little decisions can add up to something big.
The ending was also extremely well-executed. I was not expecting everything to come together the way that it did. The ending of this book was so good that it changed my mind about reading the sequels. I was planning on not reading the next two books in the series and then then I finished the Thousandth Floor. I'm not going to say anything else, just in case I spoil it but the ending made up for all of the problems that I had with the rest of the book.
With all of that being said, I think that 2 stars is a very fair rating to give this book. There were a couple of things that were really well executed and a few things that were annoying. As I said at the beginning of this review, "I didn't like this book but I also didn't hate it." However, the low rating does not mean that I will not read the sequel because the ending to the Thousandth Floor and now I have to know what happens next!
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