Oasis - Dima Zales

[goodreads]

Title: Oasis (The Last Humans, #1)
Author: Dima Zales
Genre: Dystopian, Sci-fi
Rating: 3.5/5
# pages: 238
Date read: February, 2016

My name is Theo, and I'm a resident of Oasis, the last habitable area on Earth. It's meant to be a paradise, a place where we are all content. Vulgarity, violence, insanity, and other ills are but a distant memory, and even death no longer plagues us.

I was once content too, but now I'm different. Now I hear a voice in my head, and she tells me things no imaginary friend should know. Her name is Phoe, and she is my delusion.

Or is she?


I received this ARC from Netgalley in return for an honest review. I love dystopian novels, so I figured it would be right up my aisle.

And as the rating indicates - it was. Slightly slow to start, but once it did, I really enjoyed it. It reminded me of "Ready Player One" (Ernest Cline) meets "Across the Universe" (Beth Revis) meets "Unwind" (Neil Shusterman). And if you think that sounds like a really weird meshup, I don't blame you... but it works.

I liked the twists and turns - some of which I'd seen hints of ahead of time, others I'd never seen coming, and not only did I feel nicely entertained, but I actually had a hard time letting it go after I turned the last page.

It's the first in a series, and thus no real resolution is achieved, but it didn't contain any of the stereotypical problems of a first book in a series. No cliff-hanger, no excessive world-building at the expense of plot, no major setup that's never followed through on.

If anything, I might say there was too little world-building. Some things were explained in an aside or left to be read between the lines. I think I got most of them, but a bit more 'showing' Theo's every-day life at the start of the novel might have been nice.