DarthVi

Great fast-paced chase, I also adored the fact that information about New World gets revealed gradually, mantaining curiosity in the reader. I also liked the presence of interesting themes (the possibility of reading other people's thoughts, regimes, war, etc.). BUT there's a big “but”: I don't find Todd a believable character, not to mention the exagerated amount of unfortunate events he finds himself into, which sounded like an excuse to keep the reader hooked without mantaining credibility and coherence. Too many times Todd played dumb, too many times he was reluctant to take specific actions that anyone in his situations would have taken (I'm not specifing further in order to avoid spoilers). A character so unbelievable that shattered into pieces my suspension of disbelief.
However, to anyone reading this far in this review, keep in mind that the aforementioned flaws seems to be typical of the young adult genre, meaning that if you are accustomed to them and want to focus on the good parts, I encourage you to read it anyway. Overall it's an interesting read.

I highly recommend reading this. Utopia and dystopia are some of my favourite genres, but reading this book, which is both fascinating and at the same time creepy, does not feel like reading about a dystopia, because we already have most of the technology necessary to build the “totalitarian nightmare” (as one of the characters calls it) installed by The Circle. We also already can see in our reality some aspects criticized by the book, the “fake friendships” via social network, the culture of oversharing every moment of our life to obsessively seek approval via likes and comments. And all of this is just the surface of the book, I will not write more detail about the plot and topics in order non to spoil stuff.

Regarding the pace, the first half of the book is quite slow-paced, but I encourage everyone to be patient and go through it; after the first half things start to become very interesting and scary.