Apprentice

Gr 9 Up–In Nursery Dorm 492, apprentice Kerr Flick has been taught that, “The Love Collective is your Parent. The Love Collective is your Friend. The Love Collective is your Future. Love all. Be all.” It sounds nice, but even those in the Nursery know that Haters are everywhere and must be eliminated. Kerr can’t wait to leave the Nursery and is thrilled to test into the Elite Academy, especially since it means she’ll get to leave behind the bullies who torment her about her photographic memory and call her Memory Freak. At the Academy, Kerr finds a new group of friends and is determined to use her unique set of skills to become a Watcher—the elite of the Elite. But Kerr has been having nightmares (memories?) of a time before, of someone called Cadence, and of a woman begging her not to forget. Why can’t Kerr make sense of the dreams? And why can none of her new friends remember anything before the age of five? Maybe things aren’t as perfect in the Love Collective as the apprentices first believed. Young’s novel, the first in the “Collective Underground” series, is a typical teen dystopian novel with zero surprises and nothing that makes it stand out from the many other titles in the genre. The characters are largely forgettable and interchangeable, despite some brief descriptions of skin tone and diversity implied by names.