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A review by kaylawhata
The Walled City by Ryan Graudin
4.0
*thank you to NetGalley and Little, Brown Books for Young Readers for an electronic ARC in exchange for an honest review*
Imagine a small, enclosed city without any real semblance of order, where drug lords run rampant, women are trafficked into the sex trade, and children go hungry. Dai, haunted by the sins of his past, has less than three weeks left in the Walled City to complete a mysterious job. Jin has been searching for the past two years for her sister, Mei Yee, who was sold to a brothel pay their father’s debts. She hides the fact that she’s a girl and tries to outwit and outrun gangs of vagrant boys. Dai and Jin begin an uneasy partnership running drugs for the Brotherhood, keeping their own interests in mind.
This was a gripping and action packed story with believable characters. Each chapter alternates between Dai, Jin, and Mei Yee; though it took a few chapters for me to distinguish between the three, each voice became distinct. Readers will learn early on that it is more of a thriller and nothing at all like The Maze Runner which I admit is what I first thought of when I read the description. It felt more realistic than dystopian; the “Walled City” in this novel is based on a real former military fort turned ungoverned settlement in Hong Kong. My mouth dropped open when I read that in the Author’s Note, though to be honest the whole time I was wondering if such a thing ever existed. This book is hard to pen down genre wise, but I think it could have a lot of appeal to older readers.
Imagine a small, enclosed city without any real semblance of order, where drug lords run rampant, women are trafficked into the sex trade, and children go hungry. Dai, haunted by the sins of his past, has less than three weeks left in the Walled City to complete a mysterious job. Jin has been searching for the past two years for her sister, Mei Yee, who was sold to a brothel pay their father’s debts. She hides the fact that she’s a girl and tries to outwit and outrun gangs of vagrant boys. Dai and Jin begin an uneasy partnership running drugs for the Brotherhood, keeping their own interests in mind.
This was a gripping and action packed story with believable characters. Each chapter alternates between Dai, Jin, and Mei Yee; though it took a few chapters for me to distinguish between the three, each voice became distinct. Readers will learn early on that it is more of a thriller and nothing at all like The Maze Runner which I admit is what I first thought of when I read the description. It felt more realistic than dystopian; the “Walled City” in this novel is based on a real former military fort turned ungoverned settlement in Hong Kong. My mouth dropped open when I read that in the Author’s Note, though to be honest the whole time I was wondering if such a thing ever existed. This book is hard to pen down genre wise, but I think it could have a lot of appeal to older readers.