Recon

Recon is the first book in The Fringe series by Tarah Benner, which centers around a group of people living in a compound in Utah, years after nuclear war has ravaged our country. In this hypothetical future, the system trains teens in specific field until bid day, where they are placed in a job according to test scores. Our main character, Harper Riley, has always been sure of her future. She’s smart and hard-working, it has never entered mind that she’d get a poor placement on bid day. Then the inevitable happens, and Harper finds herself thrust into worst possible job: Recon. It’s this group of people who go outside the compound to see if the environment is livable, and to protect everyone inside from possible attack. Who’s attacking we don’t yet know, but we do know that if the compound fails, the human race is as risk.

Eli is there to train Harper and the other new recruits. His job is to make them strong so they can survive in the Fringe, but he knows it’s only a matter of time until they die. He’s cold and hardened, and does everything possible to remain detached from his group of recruits because he knows what the future hold for them: death.

“Early death is a statistical certainty in Recon.”

These two have both always been alone because they both were born in the Fringe, and it’s this common background that makes Eli drawn to Harper from the beginning.

“…reason I was so drawn to Harper before I even knew her: She reminds me of me, but she’s all the things I wish I could be.”

The first thing I want to say about this story is wow. There were so many good aspects with the world-building and the plot, as well as the development of even the minor characters. It made it exciting to turn the page. I literally read this book in about seven hours’ time, and when it was over I found myself wanting more. I am really looking forward to the second book in this series. There were some obvious similarities to Divergent, but not in a copy-cat kind of way, and to be honest I liked that about Recon. I loved the first Divergent book, but the series flopped for me, so I’m really hoping that Ms. Benner can make this one work. The mystery of how the people in the Fringe are living in such high levels of radiation is intriguing, and I’m curious about how Eli and Harper survived being out there as children. I also loved the subtle connection the two characters had. It wasn’t the instant and intense attraction that you usually see in these kind of books, and it wasn’t a love hate kind of thing either. It started off slow, almost accidentally, and it developed in a nice even way that was totally believable. Don’t get me wrong, I love some steam, but in this case the slowness fit the characters and the story, and I totally bought into Eli’s desire to stay unattached. People in their circumstances die, and he didn’t want to go through that loss or put someone else through that. The bond they form is strong and sweet, and with their troubled childhoods, it makes sense that they’d find comfort in each other.

“I know I always find it shocking when I’m a part of anybody’s ‘we’.”

There are so many fantastic things I could say about this book, but I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll just say this: read it. If you love young adult (although I would really put this book in the new adult category based on the character’s ages), and you love dystopian stories, you will love this. The writing is clean and there were no glaringly obvious typos, and it didn’t lose my interest for even a second. If anything, I had the opposite problem where I put a few things off that I needed to do just so I could finish it.

While this Dystopic Sci-fi does revolve around a romantic relationship with a strong female lead character, It also has a created a unique world in which they are constantly having to work just to survive in.