The Fearless Review

The Fearless by Emma Pass 

“While I’ve been living on Hope, the rest of the world has upped and vanished.”

The Fearless is a story of how an innocent drug created to end Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for soldiers gets brought by the wrong people and then tweaked/improved to make soldiers feel no fear, improve their senses and make them want to change everybody to be like them. The novel starts of when the Fearless have reached the UK and Cass and her parents are planning to go with Cass’s best friend, Sol and his family to an island brought by Sol’s father for safety. Things go downhill when a Fearless attacks and changes Cass’s dad and Cass and her pregnant mother are forced to run from danger, they make it to the boats ready to take them to the island with the help of Sol’s family where Cass’s mother gives birth to her brother.

Cass is 17 now and it’s been seven years since she came to the island, Hope. Cass lives with her younger brother Jori and practically raises him up because their mother committed suicide five years earlier. One day when an outsider is found in Hope and Jori is kidnapped, Cass goes out of the island for the first time since her world ended.

Cass has always felt trapped on the island so she’s training to be part of the Patrol on the island this includes; trading with the outsiders and protecting the islanders. So she’s learnt how to fight the Fearless and she finds out the hard way that practicing how to defend yourself using humans is not the same.  Cass was quite a likable character; she protected her brother, understood she had to wait to find him and she stood up for herself when people treated her like a possession or object. But Cass made a lot of stupid decisions and even though the world outside is different to what she thought it would be like she made some of these decisions before venturing out.  For example she risks her life and her brothers just so the prisoner can get his jacket back.

The writing style was a bit off; there were some parts of the story where the story seems weirdly written and awkward and there wasn’t enough world building for me to actually picture the surroundings for the book. I don’t like multi povs but this story needed it because we found out each characters true personality and their secrets and events going on where Cass wasn’t there.

I enjoyed the actual plotline of Cass and Myo tracking Mara to get to Jori and how there’s different people they meet and different places they stop at. It was a typical dystopian novel in that sense but it was also different for one it didn’t have an uprising. That may be because there’s no government and that the big main group, the Magpies weren’t good but not that bad either.

At first it seems as if there’s going to be a love triangle with her best friend Sol and the new stranger Myo thankfully Sol is a complete smug bastard in the way he treats Cass as a prize to win. I also liked that after Cass rejected Sol for like tenth time and Sol was angry at her she was like fuck this I don’t care what this idiot says I don’t want to be with him and he better accept that. But Cass and Myo’s relationship was awkward, they were basically just travelling companions and then randomly they touch and they can’t stop thinking about each other whilst ignoring each other. And then in a click they’re saying they’re in love.

The ending was pretty good in the way that what Cass does but it ended so abruptly and I was left feeling like, it is that how it ends? Sure they have a plan but to end it just like that.

★★★☆☆