The Worst Thing About My Book Is

My book is The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken. I like the idea behind it. However, I don't like the way the author writes. I feel like the book moved really fast. The author seemed to be trying to cram a lot of information into the minimum amount of pages.

For example, they tried to put four years of what could have been a good story on it's own and put it into three chapters.And this information was important to the character development and her background and why what happened, actually happened. I still didn't really understand what the colors were she kept talking about or why some of the kids are being kept in a camp. However right after those three chapters, in chapter four, the main character is planning to break out of the camp. About half way the chapter the main character gets a note that has this in it, "New CC was testing for undetected Ys(Yellows), Os(Oranges), Rs(Reds). Your bad reaction means that they know you aren't G(Green). Unless you do exactly as I say, they will kill you tomorrow... I can get you out." (Bracken 46) The reaction they are talking about is what is called 'White Noise' and that's not really explained either throughout the book. All it says is it only affects the kids with these powers who are immune to a disease that killed all other children. This disease is explained to the audience by saying things like, "they just died" and never really even talking about the fact that only kids died, no adults. Why now are kids getting these powers? Or do some adults have them?

I also didn't fully understand why she was breaking out of this camp in the first place. Later in the book it talks about how horrible the camp the main character went to was worse than all the others but it never explains why because from what the reader gets from all the characters, all camps sound the same and the character nevers says anything about what happened at her camp that was so terrible. And even though I finished the book I still don't understand what each of these colors really means and how they came to be called that. Or anything at all about this plot really.

Another thing I feel like the author didn't explain was the symbol on the front of the book. After reading I can tell why it's orange and the barbed fence around it. However, I don't have any idea how the symbol is applicable to the book.

Since this is the first book in a trilogy I think that the next two books will explain everything more in depth: what the colors are and the sickness that kills only children. I find that I don't really want to read the next two books though since the only reason I read this one was to see if it ever made since, not because I enjoyed the book. I don't want to continue reading books out of confusion and mild inquisitiveness but because I think they are good books. So I plan to put this series down and pick up a book that is hopefully much better than this one.