The Jewel Series

I'll admit it- I'm a sucker for a book with a girl in a beautiful ball gown on the cover. Whoever started that trend in dystopian novels is a genius.  I loved The Selection series by Kiera Cass and Ruby Red by Kerstin Geir so when I saw the ball gown girl again on The Jewel by Amy Ewing, I bought it knowing nothing about it. Let me start with the warning that this is NOT a YA book for elementary students or really even middle school. The adult themes put it at the high school level for sure.

Violet is lot #197 in the auction of young ladies to be purchased by the highest bidder. These girls go on to become surrogates for the royal families that cannot have children of their own. Each surrogate has unique magical powers and at first, their lives in the Jewel (where the royals live), is much better than their life of desolation and poverty anywhere else in Lone City. As the surrogates soon learn, there is an undercurrent of violence, competition, and unimaginable cruelty behind the beautiful royal walls. Violet gets help from a very unlikely source to escape the Jewel and like most novels of its kind, she and her friends begin a revolution to fight against the oppression of the lower classes.

After The Hunger Games, I began to feel like every dystopian book had the same formula. I've been searching for one that offered something original and I certainly found it in this series. The idea of the surrogates and their magic powers  is completely unique as is the other cast of characters (the companions and ladies in waiting). It's very suspenseful and there are quite a few twists that I didn't see coming. It is also just racy enough to satisfy romance lovers.

While I liked the story quite a bit, I found the heroine to be unlikable. I think she is whiny and ungrateful. Every time someone offers her help, at great peril to themselves, she always does the exact opposite of what she is supposed to do. I think I would have probably just left her after the second time she directly went against me! I'm sure many people find her stubbornness endearing, but I do not. I just wanted her to be genuinely grateful to her saviors.

The Jewel introduces the reader to this society and The White Rose continues the story complete with an  awesome cliffhanger.  It was hard to stop reading and feed the other people who live in my house! The final book,The Black Key will be published this October.