Never Fade
The Darkest Minds #2
by Alexandra Bracken

My rating: 4.5 / 5
Genre: YA dystopian

Spoiler notice: The following review will contain some spoilers for the previous book in the series, The Darkest Minds.

Ruby isn’t happy to be a tool of the Children’s League, though she has to admit that the training they’ve given her has been useful. When she learns about some vital information that needs to be recovered, she embarks on a mission for the League with ulterior motives. Her quest will take her across dangerous lands, into the paths of villains of all different flavors, and, ultimately, back home again.

Given the way the previous book ended, I wasn’t sure how this one was going to go or how much I would enjoy it. But I was just as engaged as I was with the first book, maybe even more so. Through 500 pages, I was caught up, surprised by revelations or small surprises, and hard-pressed to put the book down, especially in the last 1/4 or so. There are some new characters introduced here that I ended up loving, some returning characters that had new and different roles in this book, and then there’s Ruby herself. She could easily have become a character that annoyed me, continually beating herself up for the way she’s evolving, but it never got to a point of bothering me.

This is the kind of book where I find myself uncertain about who to trust, and I’m not even sure if it’s intentional or if I just wasn’t following certain aspects of the story. I also found a particular plot point (which would be a spoiler to mention) pretty unbelievable, as it relates to the previous book in the series. Overall, though, none of this was enough to make me want to lower the star rating by more than half, and I’m really looking forward to reading the final book in the trilogy.

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