Book Review: Is the book, The Darkest Minds, worth all the hype?

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*WARNING CONTAINS SPOILERS*

As the book, The Darkest Minds, opens, we learn that the kids all around the country are dying and only a few of them survived. However those who survived were rounded up and put in camps similar to concentration camps.

They were sorted by color form red to being the most dangerous to green being the least dangerous. Ruby had used her powers in order to trick them into believing that she was a green when in reality she was an orange.

After a while they slowly kill off the reds, oranges, and yellows, until there are only blues and greens left. At this point we can tell that it is a dystopian society.

A couple chapters into the book, the PSI workers find out Ruby is actually an orange, so she escapes with the help of Cate (formally known as Dr. Begbie) but soon after, she find out that they plan on using her as as weapon for their own benefits. Ruby ends up running away and she runs into this 11-year-old girl name Zu and she leads Ruby to Liam and Chubs. Zu is mute, but I hope in the next books we can finally hear her talk.


After she meets Liam and the rest, they go on a quest to find a camp where all the special kids go to contact their parents or learn more about their powers. But they still don’t know that she’s an orange and that bothered me for most of the book because she could have helped them more if they knew she was an orange but they found out in chapter 18.

When they got to the camp, the plot was really slow and it mainly focused on Ruby trying to learn her powers and it would have been fine if they only spent like 2 chapters at most on it.

Soon they found out that Clancy (The leader of the camp) isn’t actually a good guy, and he causes the PSI to find the location of the camp. It would have been more exciting if all the kids stood up together and used their powers to take down the PSI instead of just running for their lives. And also if the whole invasion didn’t last 10 pages.

After they had Escaped, they went to deliver Jacks (one of their friends from camp) letter but Jack's dad ends up shooting Chubs because he never liked Jack. What type of story line is that? Ruby calls the children’s league in order to save Chubs life and everything seems like it’s going to be okay right?







Ruby and Liam 💓💓

Wrong!

Ruby ends up having to erase Liam’s mind from any memory of her so the children’s league can let him go. The author should have made it so that he pretended to now remember her but he still did or hopefully Ruby develops a power that allows her to give people back their memories because they should have ended up together.

The author must really have no soul in order to do that to the readers. In the end, it was a good book but the ending broke my heart and I’m still really sad about it.

--By Ermine Jacques, LS News reporter

The opinions of the stated author does not constitute an official position of the Lampeter-Strasburg School District or of the LS News editorial board.

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