Review of Lauren Miller's Free To Fall
Release Date: May 13th, 2014
Synopsis as found on GoodReads.com:
What if there was an app that told you what song to listen to, what coffee to order, who to date, even what to do with your life—an app that could ensure your complete and utter happiness?
What if you never had to fail or make a wrong choice?
What if you never had to fall?
Fast-forward to a time when Apple and Google have been replaced by Gnosis, a monolith corporation that has developed the most life-changing technology to ever hit the market: Lux, an app that flawlessly optimizes decision making for the best personal results.
Just like everyone else, sixteen-year-old Rory Vaughn knows the key to a happy, healthy life is following what Lux recommends. When she’s accepted to the elite boarding school Theden Academy, her future happiness seems all the more assured. But once on campus, something feels wrong beneath the polished surface of her prestigious dream school.
Then she meets North, a handsome townie who doesn’t use Lux, and begins to fall for him and his outsider way of life. Soon, Rory is going against Lux’s recommendations, listening instead to the inner voice that everyone has been taught to ignore — a choice that leads her to uncover a truth neither she nor the world ever saw coming.
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Excerpt from Free To Fall:
It'd been around as long as people had - but neuroscience had only recently pinned it down. For centuries people though it was a good thing, a form of psychic intuition. Some even said it was God's voice. Now we knew that the inner voice was nothing more than a glitch in the brain's circuitry, something to do with "synaptic pruning" and the development of the frontal lobe. Renaming the Doubt was a marketing strategy, part of a big public service campaign sponsored by the drug company that developed the pill to suppress it. The name was supposed to remind people what the voice really was. The enemy of reason. In kids, it was nothing to worry about, a temporary by-product of a crucial phase in the brain's development that would go away once you were old enough to ignore it. But in adults, it was the symptom of a neurological disorder that, if left untreated, would progress until you could no longer make rational decisions.
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When I ordered this book last year, I had never even read the synopsis. I was expecting a sequel to Parallel, which I FREAKING LOVED!!! So when I got it in the mail and realized that it was not a sequel, I was super disappointed. That is one of the main reasons that I have held off on reading it. After reading it (almost a year after it came out), I realize what a mistake that was. I am quickly becoming a fan of Miller's writing.
I love boarding school stories... maybe that's because as a kid I always dreamed of going to one. I'm sure I would have hated it, but it always seemed so exciting. So this book has that for it. It is not dystopian, but is set in the future. Apple has gone bankrupt and all of the handheld devices are now made by Gnosis... actually almost all high-tech inventions are made by Gnosis. The main character, Aurora or Rory for short, is a really big fan of the company.
Now handhelds are smart in this day and age, but imagine how smart they could be in the 2030's. There is an app in the future that makes decisions for them called Lux. It tells them what to wear, what to eat, when to leave to be on time... it leaves no decisions to be made by yourself. This would make everyone dependent on their handheld.
This story is not only about advanced technology. It also ties the characters into a huge mystery. Fast-forward to Rory getting an invitation into a secret society (a la Davinci Code) that sends their candidates riddles to discover their aptitude in becoming a member. This secret society is something that she finds out her mother was a part of. The mother that she didn't know even went to her school until right before she home. Not only is she solving riddles for the society, but she is solving riddles about her mother.
I'm not sure I have given you enough information on what I loved about Free To Fall, but I just can't write it all... there was SO MUCH to love about it. The was never a dull moment. At almost 500 pages, it is hard to believe that I didn't wish it would move along faster once. It was already so fast paced.
Although neither of her books go together, I would suggest both of them to anyone who loves YA books.
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