A review by hannahandherlibrary
Show Stopper by Hayley Barker

1.0

I try not to give one star reviews because I always want to try and see the best in things but this was just such an uncomfortable read, one star feels right. My thoughts:

1. The whole plot of this society divided into  the Pures (white people) and Dregs (immigrants, ethnic minorities, poor etc), and the very graphic descriptions of violence and torture committed by the Pures was very uncomfortable to read. I understand the author had good intentions and was probably trying to draw attention to discrimination and inequality in our society, but after pages and pages of these descriptions I found myself wondering, what am I supposed to gain from this? What does the author want me to take way from this book? It started to feel incredibly excessive and almost like trauma porn, the author just wanted to shock us. There's also no explanation of why all this happened in the first place. The year 2045 is mentioned in the book and I found myself wondering how we could go from where we are now, to this where people literally come to torture others in just over 20 years? As well none of the characters, but especially the Dregs, had any real independent personalities. The Pures are all entirely about hating Dregs, and the Dregs were all about how oppressed they are. It actually took until I was over halfway through the book to realise the Dregs were made up of all different ethnic/class groups because the only thing mentioned about them was either how oppressed they are or how they're being tortured this time.


2. Of course its our Pure main character who ends up saving the day 🙄 he was also somehow able to change his mind about the Dregs over just 3 days, despite his 16 years of being raised by the actual government minister responsible for oppressing Dregs? I just don't believe that someone born into that family and holding those views could change in 3 days.

3. The plot was getting more and more ridiculous as the story goes on, some things didn't add up and I felt like there were some plot holes. Random new characters were conveniently added within the last 50 pages to solve some problems.

4. The insta-love was on a whole other level, the whole story is set over just 3 days and somehow they managed to fall in love?

I only finished it because I wanted to see how the author would wrap up the story but even that left me super disappointed. Another lesson learned: don't be fooled by a pretty cover...