The Killables | Gemma Malley

As I started The Killables I found myself asking the question, “how much dystopian teen fiction can one person read?”

As you know, I thoroughly enjoyed The Hunger Games trilogy and many of the other dystopian novels to come out since then, but have we all had enough? According to Gemma Malley we haven’t!

And once I got into her book, I found myself agreeing with her after all.

The Killables is quite bleak and grey during the set-up. I was reminded of 1984 several times and how I felt when I read it (bleak and desperate). The City that Evie lives in is very controlled, very restricted and joyless. It’s a world where nobody can be trusted or believed.

It takes a while for the action to get going and for the reader to truly engage with the characters, but it does happen. Malley has been successful in creating a future world that we wouldn’t want to go to.

The second half of the book races along with lots of action, tension and a little romance. There is no OMG cliffhanger, but apparently this is the first book of a (you guessed it!) trilogy.

Parental alert: there is one extremely discrete sex scene – even I almost missed it!

_{Everyone accepted that people were different physically. But inside? Inside, they were different too. You just had to know how to tell, what to look for.}

_{Evil has been eradicated. The City has been established. And citizens may only enter after having the ‘evil’ part of their brain removed.}

_{They are labelled on the System according to how ‘good’ they are. If they show signs of the evil emerging, they are labelled a K – but no one knows quite what that means.}

_{Only that they disappear, never to be seen again…}