Candor by Pam Bachorz

Title: Candor
Author: Pam Bachorz
Source: Library
Genre: Young Adult (dystopian)
Hardcover: 256 pages
Publisher: EgmontUSA (September 22, 2009)
Rating: 4 out of 5

My thoughts:
Candor is a dystopian novel that reminded me of The Stepford Wives, but thankfully the author has a unique take on it. Candor is a town in Florida which is supposedly a heaven for parents. It’s a town where children don’t disobey, they don’t drink or smoke or do drugs, they do their homework and they maintain a respectable distance from girls. Only this heaven is creating by messing with the kids brains, by feeding messages to their unsuspecting minds. The founder of Candor thinks everything is going well but there is one person who knows about it and is doing everything to save himself from it. And it’s none other than his son, Oscar.

Oscar protects himself by creating his own messages and feeding them to himself so he does not turn into the Condor robot kids. He also helps rich kids realize they are being manipulated and help them escape for a huge fee. All his plans start falling apart when a rebellious girl Nia comes to town. He is completely smitten by her and her uniqueness and he wants to keep it that way. He does not want Nia to change.

The story was pretty slow up to this point. I was reading and wondering what is about this book that people are raving about so much. I honestly didn’t get it for the longest time. But the last 100 pages more or less made up for it. It was awesome and mind-blowing if only for that part. But it was worth it.

I liked Oscar and loved that he was not perfect. He wasn’t a caricature, he did what he could to stay sane. He also learned to profit from it. For me that was refreshing. Nia was forgettable, I couldn’t really get her appeal but it could be that she was still an original among so many robots. Did I tell you the end was amazing? Pam Bachorz’s second book Drought has just released but it’s not a sequel to Candor. But there has to be a sequel to this and it has to release soon.