"Colors," by Olivia Arndt

Audience: Young Adult

Genre: Dystopian/Science Fiction

Overall Content Rating: Clean

Content Warnings

Death

Many instances of death/murder in the form of a riot, war, and executions

Suicide

Violence/Bloodshed/Gore

Mentions of scars, branding, being beaten, being whipped, etc.

Descriptions of bruised/bloodied flesh after a beating

Overall Review

This book came a long, long way for me to not love it as much as I'd hoped. Having gotten it from a friend a few years ago, it has sat on my shelf, waiting to be loved but... I don't know that it'll ever hold more than sentimental value for me. Unfortunately, having grown up with famed dystopian novels such as The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins) and Divergent (Veronica Roth), among others that were less famed but still quite good as far as I remember (such as The Choosing by Rachelle Dekker), I went into this hoping that it would live up to not only the hype that my friend had filled me with when I first opened the gift but also the anticipation of reading it that multiplied within me as time passed.

However, while I was disappointed by a few things, I wasn't completely heartbroken over how this book turned out.

Colors by Olivia Arndt is a dystopian novel that takes place in a sci-fi world. With various people settled into a caste system, it reminded me greatly of The Selection (Kiera Cass) at first, but in the end, it became all its own world, with all its own systematic elements.

With terminology used in the book such as Outsiders, Insiders, Standards, and Opulents, I found myself astonished by how clear and easy-to-understand the terms were. Even on my first read-through, I found myself able to understand most of the terms first-try, and when I didn't understand, I found a small detail added later on that helped me understand a lot better without completely rehashing what was being talked about.

The characters themselves and their motivations were pretty good, and there were a few times when perhaps I should've known what was coming, but didn't. By the end, everything seemed to fall into place too easily and just wrap up simply, but there's the possibility that that could've been simply because I have read so many dystopian/sci-fi novels of this type.

What I really liked about this story--and what I believe was a lot of the premise of this story--was what I think disappointed me the most. The main character, Tethys, has a special ability to see people's emotions in the form of colored clouds above their heads. Later on, she finds someone else who has the same ability. Despite both these characters interacting in various places, though, they never seem to address anything more than what those color clouds seem to have in relation to who's going to die next, which I found incredibly saddening because the concept just struck me as super interesting and something that I'd love to know more about--especially with how this author seemed to want to portray it.

Overall, this was a pretty decent book. I liked it well enough, and I may recommend it to anyone who wants a simplistic and clean dystopian novel that doesn't have too much violence and gore--because this book doesn't have as much as many other dystopian and sci-fi books have--but I definitely wouldn't go around raving about it as much as I would many other books that I mentioned above. Definitely worth a shot if you're looking for a clean read, keeping in mind that the only real thing keeping me from calling it positively wholesome is the violence and death involved in the various portions of this book. While I didn't mind reading it, I probably wouldn't read it again.