Thankyou to Netgalley for an arc of this book! This story follows Nour and Malik two orphans navigating a post apocalyptic world where they are constantly being hunted on all sides, I thought the story itself was really engaging and I always appreciate the visual world building in these concepts of a world that has ended essentially. The one thing that threw me off was discovering that Malik was a teenager because the dialogue from him seemed really childish but at the same time I think it didn’t bring too much away from the story it was just jarring to me because it seemed like he was 8 or 9 from the way he spoke, other than that I thought it was an engaging story!

I did like the premise of this book, that some catastrophic global event had caused dramatic climate change and led to humans breaking off into two distinct evolutionary directions. That is not a spoiler btw, that's in the prologue.

However, I had several issues with this book:

1) I didn't enjoy the writing, I felt the author overdescribed literally everything and some of the prose was starting to turn purple
2) Character development was lacking, and the characters' actions seemed random, not motivated by their personalities or the plot, which brings me to..
3) Plot. What plot? I have seen this in a lot of self published books where the plot is just a series of things that happen, not an actual plot.
4) A lot of things in this book didn't seem well thought out and coherent. Just one example - just after the two main characters travel without too much difficulty, the book tells us the desert is impassible and anyone who tries will die. But but but... you just did!
5) We are told everything is a scorching hot desert, but nobody seems to take water with them and walks for several days without water. That just took me out of the story, I don't care how evolved these humans are, you need water in a desert. a LOT of water. A talented author could have made a lot of that throughout the book but it was like she didn't even think about it. There is apparently a source of water in the area, a talented author would have made that a big plot point, maybe the people living there have gotten rich because they control the only water in a desert.
6) Names. The names in this book frustrated me because they are all over the place with no hint as to why. We have Nour or Nourie as MC, that sounds Middle Eastern to me, other MC is Malik (whom the MC calls Licks which I assume was a shortened version of Malik, but no it's because he licks things. Gahhh!) then a brother called Derry which sounds Irish. There's an old crone called Synthese - is that a play on Synthetic? Is she a secret scientist? We have no idea because the author doesn't bother to tell us. The names frustrated me a lot.
7) Sandspan. Seems to be a unit of measure. We keep hearing that someone is 200 sandspan away or whatever but it wasn't until 3/4 of the way through the book we even get a hint how long a sandspan is and I was so frustrated by that point I wanted to scream whenever it got mentioned.
8) Finally - we have large groups of people in this book and none of them seem to have agriculture. We keep seeing people catching lizards to eat, but that can't be all that people eat? You have thousands of people, what on earth are they eating and drinking? There doesn't seem to be any trade in this world either. It's like the author thought that world building was a bit hard and just didn't bother.

I assume I'm just being fussy here and others will enjoy it despite the flaws.

This book had me on the edge of my seat from the first page all the way to the very last. I sped through this book in like a day and a half because I could not put it down. It is a fresh new Dystopian book that succeeds where so many have failed. There is a lot of really interesting world building that does not take away from the story. I would place it in the new adult category because while there is no spice there are a handful of steamy scenes. We are left on a time jump into an epilogue that I could have gone without, I think the author wanted to give us a little more of a hint for a second book in the series and leave us on a huge cliff hanger that leaves you very confused. I cannot wait to read more of Nour and Malik's story.