Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'm rating this book purely on my enjoyment of it and not on some scale deciding whether it was great literature or not. It's fluff and I loved it. So IF your favorite part of the Hunger Games was the lead-up to the actual Games (the interviews and dresses and stuff), and IF you can forgive superficial world-building (possibly with the promise of something more later in the trilogy), and IF you like stories about matchmaking reality shows (even if you don't like actually watching them), and IF you aren't tired of the trope where the prince falls in love with the girl who makes it clear that she's the only girl around who isn't in love with him and his title (usually by telling him off), THEN you will really like this book. These are all things I like (or forgive in the case of world-building). I don't know why, but I love reality show stories, even though I'm not a fan of most reality tv beyond the occasional performance show (singers, dancers, etc.). From the sample I had on my Kindle, I totally got the Hunger Games meets The Bachelor vibe (not realizing that that was how the book was marketed, lol). But it's really dystopian-lite. The caste system could be easily replaced by the districts in HG, but that's really all the dystopia there is. That's fine because I don't need heavy dystopia in my dystopia. Instead, as far as the first book goes, the royal family seems perfectly reasonable. There are rebels, and we don't know anything about them except that they're searching the palace for something (I predict it has something to do with the symbol Gavril, the Ryan-Seacrest-of-this-world, was wearing that was mentioned very very briefly). I would assume that eventually they're going to kidnap America and we'll see their side and the actual dystopia, but that doesn't happen here. Instead we have a princely prince and not a corrupt government, and so it's almost more The Bachelor meets Cinderella with a hint of Hunger Games. Some bad things: Some of the names are beyond ridiculous. America Singer, Tuesday Keeper, Tiny, Maxon, Aspen. These are the worst names I've ever seen in a YA. For a younger audience, they might have been fine. We also have some oddly similar names, such as Marlee, Mary, and May (plus Maxon). I also felt some inconsistency with America's character. She's a performer, but she spends the 2nd half of the book complaining about being in the spotlight. When she lashes out at Maxon the first couple times, it didn't ring true to me based on her earlier actions and thoughts. Some good things: The story really grabbed a hold of me and didn't let me go. I read the sample two nights ago, and then wished I had bought it all through work the next day. So I bought it as soon as I got home and read it overnight. The caste system might have sketchy world-building behind it, but it did make for an interesting dynamic between some of the characters (particularly America and the people of lower castes). I actually liked most of the major characters, including both love interests. I see a lot of potential for the rest of the trilogy to bring things in. I think there might have been some things that should have given more weight here, but the book worked well enough without them. The book doesn't finish on a cliffhanger so much, but the competition isn't over yet, and next book will enter a new stage of it. Recommended for people who love: dystopia-lite, the interview/dress-up portion of The Hunger Games, books about matchmaking reality shows, that prince-falls-for-the-girl-who-least-wants-him trope, books with ballgowns on the cover (easy to find these days), a bit of Cinderella, love triangles, crazy names, stuff going on behind the scenes that we'll find out in the next book, unresolved endings.