Publisher’s summary: Divided by day and night and on the run from authorities, star-crossed young lovers unearth a sinister conspiracy in this compelling romantic thriller.
Seventeen-year-old Soleil Le Coeur is a Smudge—a night dweller prohibited by law from going out during the day. When she fakes an injury in order to get access to and kidnap her newborn niece—a day dweller, or Ray—she sets in motion a fast-paced adventure that will bring her into conflict with the powerful lawmakers who order her world, and draw her together with the boy she was destined to fall in love with, but who is also a Ray.
Set in a vivid alternate reality and peopled with complex, deeply human characters on both sides of the day-night divide, Elizabeth Fama's Plus One is a brilliantly imagined drama of individual liberty and civil rights, and a fast-paced romantic adventure story.
My take: Now that’s an awesome ending! I think I liked it because that ending wasn’t a surprise to me, and it’s not a happily ever after because it would be way too impossible to have an ending that worked out after everything that happened in this book.
This book took me a little longer to read than I would have liked because there were just a few things I had a hard time relating to, and I debated my star rating for quite a while but I think these following issues had way too much influence than I would have liked. First, what’s up with this book and people acting like stealing a baby is as okay as stealing someone’s phone simply because you have the intent of returning it? It’s a baby! And not just one baby is involved, two completely different babies from two completely different families are stolen, and for two completely different reasons. This should be an extremely serious situation, and people wouldn’t just tiptoe around this kind of thing! And I don’t care who you are, as a parent you’d change your whole life if this happened to your children because it’s a natural need for parents to be so protective. And I know that the whole point to the kidnapping of these babies is to try to show this extreme seriousness, but so many unconcerned people were involved that it was hard for me to accept! I just had a really hard time coming to terms with this idea. The other thing I had a hard time with is the lifestyles of these people. This whole Day people verses Night people lifestyle thing, evolving out of the Spanish flu of 1918, was hard to wrap my mind around as to the “why.” At first, I kept wondering if this was a futuristic book where the people were all told the wrong history of the world. But then I realized it’s a book where this is a “could have been” lifestyle brought about if we separated people between night and day (for whatever reason) because of the Spanish flu. I just had an extremely hard time with this fantasy vision of the world, obviously, because it didn’t happen in the real world. But you give me a book with a bunch of power hungry people, and I’ll get it.
Other than all of that, I really loved the story. The characters were really well done! It was like they were meant to be together. Sol was a little too selfless for my liking, but I still ended up liking her. And now that I’ve fallen in love with the characters and I’ve wrapped my head around the world Elizabeth Fama created, I’m super excited to read the next book!
