Book Notes: "Fragments", by Dan Wells

Fragments by Dan Wells
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An enjoyable sequel to the post-apocalyptic YA novel "Partials", my favorite part of "Fragments" was the setting. After introducing us to the war-and-disease ravaged city of New York in the first book, Dan Wells dives even further into his world-building as we follow the heroine, Kira, on a desperate search across the abandoned and decayed United States.

I loved seeing both how consistent and how novel the world in this story was. Consistent, because all the destruction followed logically given the disasters of the plot, and novel because the disaster had affected all the different parts of the country in different ways. After being introduced to the looted and overgrown city of New York in the first book, this time we got to see the half-sunken city of Chicago and the acid-rain decayed metropolis of Denver and all the crazy countryside in between. Loved it!

In the beginning I didn't care as much about the mystery of the plot as the main characters did, which was too bad, but it was still interesting enough to push the story along, and it really picked up steam by the end. Meanwhile, I was enjoying the tour of the re-imagined United States too much to abandon the story. I think the third book will probably take us back to New York, but I have a kind of forlorn hope that for some reason the characters will have to cross the Pacific or Atlantic in order to find out the result of the plague on other continents. I'd love to see what Wells would do there.

View all my reviews

-Jessica Snell