This series really is a Hunger Games, Ender's Game, and Lord of the Flies read-alike, with some additional dystopian elements I can't quite place. It would appeal to fans of Divergent and Howey's Silo Saga, too, I suspect, though I hesitate to call it a "read-alike" for either one.

It's good, and although it's a very masculine-feeling book, with a male protagonist whose antagonists are mostly also male (and at least one woman in a refrigerator), Brown's female characters still feel like real people with their own goals.

It was probably stupid of me to read the second book now, when the third and final book isn't coming out for a while. Like any good middle book, it is (in some ways) darker and higher-stakes than its predecessor, and it ends (as it should) on a cliffhanger.