Review: The Key To Fear by Kristin Cast

The Key to Fear by Kristin Cast
Verdict: eh. The second book would probably be better

Summary

 To Health.To Life.To the Future.

We are The Key.

‘No touching today for a healthy tomorrow.

Elodie obeys The Key. Elodie obeys the rules. Elodie trusts in the system. At least, Elodie used to…

Aidan is a rebel. Aidan doesn’t do what he’s told. Aidan just wants to be free. Aidan is on his last chance…

After a pandemic wiped out most of the human race, The Key took power. The Key dictates the rules. They govern in order to keep people safe. But as Elodie and Aidan begin to discover there is another side to The Key, they realise not everything is as it seems.

Rather than playing protector, The Key are playing God. 

Thoughts

This was better than I expected, because for some reason I kind of expected this to be a B-tier book. I thought it would have somewhat subpar writing, and maybe kind of flat characters, and the plot would be kind of predictable. I guess I forgot that Kristin Cast wrote this, and they have a lot of experience writing books (which I used to love as a teen). So the writing was definitely better than I thought it would be going in!

The rest of it, though….

This book was kind of odd. I felt like I was still in the beginning portion where I was getting to know some of the background on the characters, and seeing the way they interacted, the first time the MCs met, and all of those introductory elements. And then I checked how far in I was, and was already over halfway through. Granted this is a shorter book, but WOW! Not much happens in this book. It feels very much like the first book in a series, by which I mean the later books might be better because of the work put into this one. But this one alone? Ehhhh….

My biggest issue with this book is that the moment the main character discovers the big shocking twist (to her, anyway) — I actually couldn’t tell if it had happened!!! There was so little reaction. It was like a single sentence as she left, that seemed to come out of nowhere. No one had to calm her down, no one was explaining it to her, she just said it herself without prompting and then left like it wasn’t a world-changing revelation. It was SO vague that when that secret comes into play soon after, I wasn’t sure if her reaction to that event was because she knew, or because she didn’t know!

Okay, spoilers here because writing about it vaguely is tough.
(view spoiler)[She just says herself something vague about how touching isn’t deadly, then walks out of the warehouse. Then later when she and Aidan kiss, I genuinely wasn’t sure if she knew it was not deadly, or if she just didn’t care in that moment! Either way, I think she should have had MUCH more of a reaction to that massively pivotal moment in her life. How could she so easily ignore this dogma she’d adhered to strictly her whole life?? “Oh it’s fake? You have no evidence? Sounds good, let’s make out even though I’ve literally never touched another person in any way.”) (hide spoiler)]

Anyway. It was… okay. I finished it, it was short, it was fine. I might read the next one, because the ending was much more interesting than anything else. Overall this was a fairly tepid start to the series for me.