Paradigm by Ceri A. Lowe.

Summary:

What if the end of the world was just the beginning?

Alice Davenport awakens from a fever to find her mother gone and the city she lives in ravaged by storms – with few survivors.

When Alice is finally rescued, she is taken to a huge underground bunker owned by the mysteriousParadigm Industries. As the storms worsen, the hatches close.

87 years later, amidst the ruins of London, the survivors of the Storms have reinvented society. The Model maintains a perfect balance – with inhabitants routinely frozen until they are needed by theIndustry.

Fifteen-year-old Carter Warren knows his time has come. Awoken from the catacombs as a contender for the role of Controller General, it is his destiny to succeed – where his parents failed.

But Carter soon discovers that the world has changed, in ways that make him begin to question everything that he believes in. As Carter is forced to fight for those he loves and even for his life, it seems that the key to the future lies in the secrets of the past...

  'Now you see it, now you don't'

  This book is truly a chilling apocalyptic read filled with death, destruction and a world that I'm sure no sane person on this earth would want to live in.

  From the very beginning I enjoyed this book although it had a tendency to make me cry...quite a lot. You grow a kind of attachment - but not an attachment with the characters, like you get used to them being there even if you don't neccassarily agree with them and feel empathetic towards them, which I thought was clever because I thought it tied in with the idea that was entwined with the plot of the book - that difference between 'living and exsisting'. The characters just exsisteda and that made you frustrated with them as a reader and made me in particular very emotional...but let's not get into the life of a fangirl now, shall we?

  The character development in this book is fantastic as we follow the pole opposites of life with Carter Warren and life with Alice Davenport. I found myself preffering Alice in the beggining of the book yet by the end I had switched sides to 'Team Carter' for lack of a better term, haha!

  The concept is brilliant too - a fantastic twist on the 'end of the world, global warming apocalypse' story that I, and I'm sure others have grown tired of; although this book brings it into a new light and has opened my mind back to the exciting dread which comes with the idea, rather than the drabness of being taught over and over how preserving energy and turning off the Tv when you've finished with it will somehow miraculously save us all, and don't even get me started on greenhouse gases. But this book managed to push past that and come up with absolutely terryfying scenarios and situations that I myself could never in a million years have thought of.

  So, although it wasn't much of an 'upbeat' book, I still loved it even with all the horror it instilled in me, and that's why I'm giving this book a full 5 star rating and I'll be waiting on tender hooks for the release of the sequel.

  ***** 5/5 stars *****

For more information, visit the authors website : www.cerialowe.com