Incarceron by Catherine Fisher

Incarceron
Catherine Fisher
Narrated by Kim Mai Guest

Holy weird book Batman.  I’ve tried writing an intro paragraph to review this book four times and I’ve chucked them all.  There is no way to describe this book other than different, weird, and “how in the H did Catherine Fisher come up with the ideas in this book?”

Incarceron is a prison.  A prison world that does not have guards or walls.  It’s a living prison.  Sometime in the future, there’s a huge war and the government decides to create a prison where people can live, move around, marry, have children and even die eventually, and supposedly putting them in their own world – a world that thinks and guards them with some electronic super-intelligence – will create a perfect society both in and outside the prison.  Of course, things don’t work out the way we want them to do they?  Outside the prison, life has gone back to the Middle Ages.  Technology is technically banned, and protocol dictates that everyone life as if it were the 1800’s.  All electronics are banned, but it seems that everyone uses them anyway.  There is surveillance everywhere, and just about everyone knows how to dodge it.
Claudia is the daughter of the warden of Incarceron and she is engaged to the prince.  She and her best friend and tutor, Jared, are convinced that there is more to Incarceron than her father claims and they find a key to Incarceron and try to break in.  Through the key they manage to make contact with people inside Incarceron – a man named Finn who they believe is actually Prince Giles, the true heir to the throne thought to have died many years before.  The more Claudia tries to locate Incarceron and the more Finn tries to find a way out, the more confusing the story gets.  Intrigue and mystery abound in this one, let me tell you.  There is nothing I hate more than a mystery that is too easy to solve – the suspense actually has to be suspenseful for me.  However, this book had so much suspense and intrigue, I actually got kind of lost in it, though I'm not sure it was because of the book itself or because of the narration*.  The ending is not what I would expect and lends itself to a sequel, but to be honest, I’m not sure I'll read it.

*This post is connected to my post about audiobooks.  Feel free to read it!