Icons (Icons #1) by Margaret Stohl

Icons (Icons #1) by Margaret Stohl

Goodreads Synopsis
Your heart beats only with their permission.

Everything changed on The Day. The day the windows shattered. The day the power stopped. The day Dol′s family dropped dead. The day Earth lost a war it didn′t know it was fighting.

Since then, Dol has lived a simple life in the countryside - safe from the shadow of the Icon and its terrifying power. Hiding from the one truth she can′t avoid.

She′s different. She survived. Why?

When Dol and her best friend, Ro, are captured and taken to the Embassy, off the coast of the sprawling metropolis once known as the City of Angels, they find only more questions. While Ro and fellow hostage Tima rage against their captors, Dol finds herself drawn to Lucas, the Ambassador′s privileged son. But the four teens are more alike than they might think, and the timing of their meeting isn′t a coincidence. It′s a conspiracy.

Within the Icon′s reach, Dol, Ro, Tima, and Lucas discover that their uncontrollable emotions - which they′ve always thought to be their greatest weaknesses - may actually be their greatest strengths.

Bestselling author Margaret Stohl delivers the first book in a heart-pounding series set in a haunting new world where four teens must piece together the mysteries of their pasts - in order to save the future.

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Wow what a beginning to a series. Some of the book was a little slow and the trip into the Hole seemed out of place for the story, but overall I really enjoyed it. The characters were all really well written and developed; they were truly complex and diverse characters.

There was a lot of terminology and names of things in the book that were used interchangeably for somethings but then were used to mean something than what I thought it meant, which made it really confusing. The plot seemed to jump around a lot without much explanation given.

The world building was done outside of the actual novel in the last pages of the chapter like the doctor's notes and autopsy reports, which I found irritating because it could have easily been placed within the story and not have given semi-spoilers about the course of the plot. Some of them tended to be confusing to me and because of the spoilers that were in them, I didn't want to read them but knew that I had to because they helped progress the plot along. I didn't really like that.

I am not sure I liked that it was written in first person in Dol's perspective because she can literally feel people's feelings so it could have been done from an omnipresent narrator that could describe Dol and her ability while still describing everyone's feelings towards certain situations. This became a minor problem towards the end of the book for me. It is definitely one I would recommend to people who enjoy dystopian novels and young adult in general.


Overall: 4/5 stars because it kept my attention and I really like how Margaret Stohl writes.