XVI by Julia Karr
Series: XVI #1
Source: Bought
Release Date: January 6, 2011
Every girl gets one.
An XVI tattoo on the wrist--sixteen.
Some girls can't wait to be sixteen, to be legal. Nina is not one of them. Even though she has no choice in the matter, she knows that so long as her life continues as normal, everything will be okay.
Then, with one brutal strike, Nina's normal is shattered; and she discovers that nothing that she believed about her life is true. But there's one boy who can help--and he just may hold the key to her past.
But with the line between attraction and danger as thin as a whisper, one thing is for sure...
For Nina, turning sixteen promises to be anything but sweet.
I read this book for my March Random Reads pick. Going into the book I knew it wasn't going to amaze me. I read a lot of bad reviews on this book, but of course I still forged ahead to make my own decision. Unfortunately, the reviews were right with the one. It had great promise, an interesting plot, but it just wasn't executed eloquently. So my run of mediocre books continues. I feel like I haven't read a solid four or five star book in forever!
Nina Oberon is fifteen, soon to be sixteen. In her world sixteen year olds or "sex-teens" have no rights. They are basically expected to have sex with whomever. One of the problems I had with this book is that the author didn't do a lot of background world building. The End-Of-Wars was mentioned frequently, but what were they? How did this sex-teen world come to be? The concept of the world is interesting, but it wasn't explained very well.
Girls don't have choices in this world. Women's reproductive rights are no existent. If a girl gets pregnant before she is sixteen she is forced to have an abortion and if she is sixteen, she doesn't get to decide, only the guy's opinion matters. Throughout the novel girls were either deemed virginal if they dressed conservatively or whores and deserved what they got if they dressed provocatively. There was a lot of unanswered questions I had by the time I finish the book. Hopefully, they will be answered in the next book, but I honestly don't think I will be continuing with this series.
