Book Blog 1 on Starters by Lissa Price

Starters is about a girl who rents her body to old people.  She is a homeless teenager who struggles to keep her and her brother from starving.  She lives in world were all the middle aged persons have been killed by biological weapons.  In order to make money keep herself alive she has to go to a corporation called Prime Destination where they rent her body to old people so they can live in a young body again, so they can literally be young again.

I do not enjoy reading this book.  I think it is a stereotypical teen fictional novel and it bores me.  I specifically choose this book because I though it couldn’t possibly be twisted into one of my two generalizations of teen fiction:  post apocalypse stories or romance, most the time with supernatural lovers.  To my frustration this both has turned out to be my least favorite thing a weird twist of both of my despised categories. 

Starters begins by explaining that it is set in the US after biological warfare.  The children and the elders were vaccinated before the missiles with spores hit the west coast.  This left only minors and elders: starters

and enders.  Unfortunately I found that this situation was in fact my loathed story of scavenging for food and trying to survive after all civilization seemed to be gone.  It meets all the clichés of my post apocalyptic category: living in abandoned buildings, fighting other survivors, and the previously mentioned: scavenging for food.  I have found that these type books are being mass-produced with different titles.

 Starters seemed to be the one book that wouldn’t have a annoying love plot on the side.  I thought that and then I read this.

Suddenly a flash of guilt came over me about Michael.  Even though we weren’t really boyfriend and girlfriend, there really was something special between us.  And there were other reasons I had to stop thinking about Blake.

I knew then that this was the same as every other teen fiction book.  It had a young confused
teen trying to decide who she loves most.  But wait, oh no, she can’t love them both, she has to choose.   This upsets me because it makes the book even more cliché and boring to me.