‘The Sin Soldiers’ and ‘The Crystal War’ (Fragments Trilogy) by Tracy Auerbach

Five stars!

Book Blurb:

“Red compound makes them angry. Yellow exhausts them. Blue drives them into a state of ravenous addiction. The thief Kai knows about the chemically controlled soldiers of the Eastern forces and their savage, deadly nature.  When a robbery attempt at Club Seven goes wrong, Kai is captured by a handler and his bestial soldier-boy. She wakes up inside the military base with no idea what happened to her twin brother, Dex.

Things go from bad to worse when Kai is started on a drug and training regimen, and forced to take injections of blue compound. The scientists in charge plan to make her into a working soldier who will mine the mysterious power crystals beneath the desert.  Kai becomes a victim of the bully Finn, a handsome but nasty soldier whose years on red compound seem to have erased his humanity. Still, she begins to pity the Seven Soldiers, including the monstrous boy who tried to rip her to shreds at the club. They appear to be nothing more than genetically enhanced, drug-controlled teenagers.

On the outside, Dex and his tech-savvy boyfriend try to crack the soldiers’ chemical code to find a weakness that will break the system. But Kai has already been drawn deep into her new world. Strong feelings for the soldiers she’s come to know have started to cloud her judgment. Can she escape and find Dex without becoming a monster herself?”

Review:

The 'Fragments' series captivated me from the beginning.  Though I found this to be a very dark science fiction dystopia, I found myself continuing to read because I became so invested in the characters, what they were going through, and kept wanting to find out what happened next.  Whereas 'The Sin Soldiers' follows 4 main narrating characters, Kai and the 3 soldiers she befriends, 'The Crystal War' includes these 4 and more narrators, allowing readers to become invested in even more of the main characters.  Author Tracy Auerbach is a skilled writer not only for her world building and character development, but also because it is easy to determine who is narrating, each and every time.  Glad to see some LGBT representation as well.

Looking forward to reading this trilogy's conclusion, hopefully the wait won't be too long!  Start reading ‘The Sin Soldiers’ now in preparation for ‘The Crystal War’ on April 17, 2020.

#TheCrystalWar #NetGalley - I voluntarily read a Review Copy of this book.  All opinions stated are solely my own and no one else’s.