Review: The Young World by Chris Weitz

Title: The Young World (The Young World, #1)
Author: Chris Weitz
Rating: ★★★★★ (5/5 Stars)
Hardcover, 384 Pages
Published July 2014
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Summary: After a mysterious Sickness wipes out the rest of the population, the young survivors assemble into tightly run tribes. Jefferson, the reluctant leader of the Washington Square tribe, and Donna, the girl he's secretly in love with, have carved out a precarious existence among the chaos. But when another tribe member discovers a clue that may hold the cure to the Sickness, five teens set out on a life-altering road trip to save humankind. The tribe exchanges gunfire with enemy gangs, escapes cults and militias, braves the wilds of the subway and Central Park...and discovers truths they could never have imagined.

I received a copy of The Young World from Little, Brown Books in exchange for an honest review. Amber had read this book as an ARC a few months back and wasn't that crazy about it, so I went into this not expecting it to be that fantastic.

AND I WAS SO WRONG. I'm not usually a fan of giving books five star reviews (because that's the highest rating we can give at The Book Bratz and that title is very hard to achieve here), but I absolutely loved this book from start to finish and I was so glad that Little, Brown Books was kind enough to send me a copy.

The whole idea of the story is that in the future (although not too far into the future, almost like an alternate present-day reality) a Sickness spreads that kills everyone younger than teenage age and older than eighteen. And when these last living teens reach the ripe old age of eighteen, they die as well. The Sickness has something to do with the proteins in the body that can combat the Sickness, and they're only present in teenagers.

So, after the Sickness wipes out a massive amount of the overall population of the world, the teenagers are left in charge. Uh oh. It goes just as well as you'd expect at first - lots of fighting (because they're forced to fend for themselves), lots of drugs (because who's going to stop them? Their dead parents?), and tons of sex. (Because not only are their parents not around to stop them and they only have until their eighteenth birthday to live a full and complete life, but they're sterile, too.) Eventually, they manage to all band together to create little "societies" or towns throughout New York City. Jefferson is head of the Washington Square section when his older brother, Wash, dies and relinquishes his position after his eighteenth birthday. 

This book was equal parts hysterical (especially in Donna's point of view) and thrilling. More than once I had to put the book down because I was in tears of laughter over what one of the characters said, or I've had to stop for a second and think about what just happened because Chris Weitz had just managed to blow my mind. This book deserves nothing less than five stars, and I raved about it so much that Amber is actually considering re-reading it and giving it another shot. (Victory!) 

All in all, The Young World was a thrilling, interesting, and absolutely hysterical book. I recommend it to anybody looking for a new sort of dystopian to read, and I'm super excited to read the next book in the series - even if it is a long time away! I love Chris Weitz's style of writing and I'm very interested in seeing what else he has in store. Five out of five stars for The Young World!

PLEASE NOTE: I received a copy of The Young World from Little, Brown Books in exchange for an honest review. Every thought and opinion expressed in this review is entirely my own and was in no way influenced by Little, Brown Books, nor did the publisher or author Chris Weitz have any knowledge of this review before it was published on November 30th, 2014.