Review: The Program

The Program by Suzanne Young

Publisher: Simon Pulse
Publication Date: April 30th 2013
Pages: 408
Source: Library
Genre: Dystopian, Romance
Goodreads

Sloane knows better than to cry in front of anyone. With suicide now an international epidemic, one outburst could land her in The Program, the only proven course of treatment. Sloane’s parents have already lost one child; Sloane knows they’ll do anything to keep her alive. She also knows that everyone who’s been through The Program returns as a blank slate. Because their depression is gone—but so are their memories.

Under constant surveillance at home and at school, Sloane puts on a brave face and keeps her feelings buried as deep as she can. The only person Sloane can be herself with is James. He’s promised to keep them both safe and out of treatment, and Sloane knows their love is strong enough to withstand anything. But despite the promises they made to each other, it’s getting harder to hide the truth. They are both growing weaker. Depression is setting in. And The Program is coming for them.

I really had a hard time liking this book in the long run. I was expecting a lot after reading and really liking Suzanne Young's A Need So Beautiful and A Want so Wicked. I loved the idea of a world where suicide had become an epidemic. I thought that that idea could have become really interesting but once the story started to play out it evolved into a different kind of story than what I had expected or wanted to read. There were a lot of different parts of the book I wish had been done differently.

As it might be expected this book was just extremely depressing. At the beginning the characters were so sad it was terrible. I suppose it was to be expected but it didn't seem to stop.

When the story began I became very curious to what the reasoning behind the who suicide epidemic was. I was really hoping that there would be some sort of clarification of some sort by the end, but sadly there was not. If there was going to be some sort of quirky interesting feature of the story like that I want to find out why, and I felt like there really was no reason it was just happening because it could, and no one seemed to be trying to figure out why.

The story was extremely romance based. I like the romance to an extent. I thought the pairing was cute, and I loved the story behind the two characters but the romance in this story seemed to be the main story line and there could have been so much more to it. I felt like pretty much the main message in the story was pretty much NOTHING WILL EVER TEAR US APART, and that was pretty much it.

I mentioned this in my post about my thoughts on books with memory loss post but I really did not like how the book started with the the main character's memory intact, and then her memory being lost later, so that the readers know more than the main character about her past. This is really a personal opinion, but I don't enjoy knowing more than the characters do in the story in any form because it really annoys me.