Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Children's for providing me with an egalley of this book to read and give an honest review. The opinions expressed here are my own.
I don't know why I didn't realize this was book #2 of a series when I requested it. I would have never done so had I realized. I went into a bit confused. So I went back and read some information about book #1 to get an idea. I see it was written by a different author, so I didn't have that knowledge going into this one (as others did and from the reviews I can see they saw the difference in the writing).
I would say this was pretty action packed for a middle grade type book. I love sci-fi so that element was there and the world was good (though I imagine would have been easier to understand had I read the first book and got the building under my belt). I honestly found the pacing a bit slow, though. I wanted things to happen and get resolved, or at least have an impact on what was going on and I just didn't feel that. It felt like a very basic middle grade. I do understand the age group it's focused on but I've read many middle grade books that had a bit more oomph than this one.
Overall, I wasn't particularly impressed (and I've read Wasserman's YA which I did enjoy). I imagine middle grade readers will enjoy it enough to want to read the series. But just wasn't for me.