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TORN by Avery Hastings

TORN

From the Feuds series, volume 2

by Avery Hastings

Pub Date: July 21st, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05927-7
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin

Star-crossed lovers Cole and Davis may be miles apart, but their goals for the future still follow a similar trajectory—toward each other.

When Davis discovers that the state-of-the-art medical facility she's been sent to is actually a dumping ground for people with hopeless cases of the disease Narxis, she teams up with a new friend, Mercer, to escape and bring the truth back to her family. Meanwhile, her boyfriend, Cole, faces his own demons as he hides from the law and follows an impossible training program with the goal of competing in the Olympiads, a contest usually reserved for the genetically superior Priors. Both Davis and Cole are confronted with temptation—can they resist and find their ways back to each other? This might be unlikely, especially since Davis believes Cole is dead. Hastings returns to the futuristic world of Feuds (2014), in which some people are born with superior genetics and some people aren't, to explore themes of corruption, bigotry, and inequality. Davis and Cole follow paths that hold few surprises and suffer from unlikely epiphanies and conveniences, such as Davis' discovery of a lost family member and Cole's discovery of a pregnant Prior, which is exactly what his friend Worsley needs to search for a cure for Narxis.

The setting never comes to life, and the characters never inspire real caring in this paint-by-numbers second volume.

(Dystopian romance. 12-15)