ARC Review & Giveaway: Dualed by Elsie Chapman

Dualed by Elsie Chapman
Published: February 26, 2013
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 304
Series: Dualed #1
My Rating: 3 of 5 stars

You or your Alt? Only one will survive.

The city of Kersh is a safe haven, but the price of safety is high. Everyone has a genetic Alternate—a twin raised by another family—and citizens must prove their worth by eliminating their Alts before their twentieth birthday. Survival means advanced schooling, a good job, marriage—life.

Fifteen-year-old West Grayer has trained as a fighter, preparing for the day when her assignment arrives and she will have one month to hunt down and kill her Alt. But then a tragic misstep shakes West’s confidence. Stricken with grief and guilt, she’s no longer certain that she’s the best version of herself, the version worthy of a future. If she is to have any chance of winning, she must stop running not only from her Alt, but also from love . . . though both have the power to destroy her.

Elsie Chapman's suspenseful YA debut weaves unexpected romance into a novel full of fast-paced action and thought-provoking philosophy. When the story ends, discussions will begin about this future society where every adult is a murderer and every child knows there is another out there who just might be better.

My Review: This book sounds so interesting and the cover makes it look so exciting and action packed right? Well it seems like it took forever for the action to really start. The book starts off right in the middle of things. Chord just got his assignment and Luc and West are going to go with him to find his Alt. Luc ends up getting killed and Chord kills his Alt. That's basically where the book begins.

West wasn't a bad main character. It was like she was a real person. Her entire family had been killed and now she has to fight for her life. Her grief over her brother and the rest of her family was so real that I felt that I had known her for much longer than a book. She was also just a normal girl. Yes she was trained to kill, but she wasn't the best shot or the best at anything. She was completely normal. There was nothing special about her and it was refreshing. Most YA heroines have something special about them that makes them different so it was nice to read about a girl that is different from most main characters.

The other characters were normal too but they were kind of boring. The Alts never had names so I felt kind of distanced from them. They didn't seem like real people. They seemed like the evil twin even if they weren't. I would have liked to get to know all of the Alts more and I was holding onto to this little sliver of hope that somehow West would beat the system and figure out a way to not have to kill her Alt. Sadly that didn't happen.

The whole striker thing seemed to come out of no where in the beginning of the book. A person that West doesn't even know talks to her about it and then the strikers let her become one of them even though they don't normally hire idles since they have no experience. I'm also a little confused about a striker killing their clients Alt. Shouldn't that be considered an Assist Kill and how does The Board not notice?

Most of Dualed was focused on the killing so it did have action in it, but the action never lasted very long. It didn't take West very long to take down someone else's Alt. It took her almost the entire book to accept that she was active and that she was going to kill her Alt or be killed by her Alt, but that only bothered me a little bit.

There was a little bit of romance in the book, but it didn't feel real. Chord wanted to help her by making sure that she was safe, but West didn't want him around because she was afraid that he would be a PK. So obviously they both wanted the other to live, but to me they just seemed like really good friends.

The ending basically wrapped everything up so I'm curious about what will happen in the next book.

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