Reckoning by Kerry Wilkinson (review)

Silver knows she has a pretty good chance of being picked for one of the top work tiers, and she’s excited about the idea of being selected in the Offering, a process whereby teens from different regions are chosen to serve the central king. Chosen she is, and she is quickly whisked away to a feast that instantly goes awry when one boy is executed for making noise at a bad time. Silver quickly learns that mere survival is the absolute best-case scenario in this awful place, and she immediately focuses all of her energy on one task: escape. Wilkinson pulls off the merge of technology and medieval setting well, offering effective scenes where the two smoothly coexist. Unfortunately, everything else in this novel has been seen before, and plenty of times: the central government enacting punishment on the regions by taking chosen children, the scrappy, too-smart-for-her-own-good girl who decides she must save more than herself, and even the evil despot who chops off heads with caricatured verve are all disappointingly hackneyed. Nevertheless, Silver is a cool mix of tech genius and boy-crazy teen, and her narrative voice, defiant even as it wavers, will likely be the most memorable thing readers take from this novel.