The Raging Ones by Krista and Becca Ritchie

The Quick Cut: Three people are bonded together after they fail to die on their predetermined death day and start to feel connected to one another. Trying to avoid detection, they all join together to compete for a spot on the StarDust mission.

A Real Review:

Thank you to St Martin's Press for providing the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

In this future, everyone's date of death is predetermined and the societal class you're in is determined by how long you're going to live. Those with long lives are called influencers while those with shorter life spans are called Fast Trackers. Influencers get to live with wealth, education, and all their dreams realized while Fast Trackers get looked down upon as seeking nothing more than a high before they die.

This is the reality that our three heroes are living with are all three of them were born and designated Fast Trackers. It all starts wtih Franny on her death day and things going horribly awry for her when she gets attacked by a group of guys - knocking her unconscious. However, when she wakes up... its the day after her death day. Being totally confused and not understanding how this is possible, she runs into our other two heroes: Court and Mykal. They all share the common bond of having lived through their death day and not understood why they managed to survive through it.

Wanting to continue to escape death and detection from the rest of society, they come up with the money to register for the mysterious StarDust mission. Once they register, are all deemed worthy, and get in - it turns out that they have to compete for one of five spots on the Saga 5 mission in an attempt to do what no one expected. From one thousand people, they have to learn, fight, run, and quiz their way through to make it.

I loved the beginning of this one and once the group gets to StarDust, the story continues to drive and keep you interested, but there was definitely a slow point between Franny meeting up with Court and Mykal and getting into the competition. It made it hard to keep focused, but at least it was a short section of the book. This is really my only complaint about the book. What I really enjoyed about this one is that they did NOT go the route of the far too typical love triangle here. Court and Mykal are the very much couple in this story and Franny doesn't come anywhere near getting in the way of that.

With a combination of science fiction and romance, this story about three people who avoid death and attempt to make it to space tell a unqiue tale about working together along with learning the truth to their existence.

My rating: 4 out of 5