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In the first book of this series, The Testing, 16-year-old Cia Vale was chosen by the United Commonwealth government as one of the best and brightest graduates of all the colonies … a promising leader in the effort to revitalize postwar civilization. In Independent Study, Cia is a freshman at the University in Tosu City with her hometown sweetheart, Tomas—and though the government has tried to erase her memory of the brutal horrors of The Testing, Cia remembers. Her attempts to expose the ugly truth behind the government’s murderous programs put her—and her loved ones—in a world of danger. But the future of the Commonwealth depends on her.
I give this book 3.5/5 stars. After a great first book, this sequel really fell short. It wasn’t nearly as engaging and exciting, the romance was even more bland than it was in the first book, and the plot never seemed to go anywhere. A good sequel still tells its own complete story, but this book felt like the entire plot was a setup for the third book.
The pacing of Independent Study is a lot different from The Testing. There isn’t as much excitement, and there are rarely any cliffhanger moments that made me want to keep reading. I don’t mind slower-paced stories, as long as there is still character development happening, but this book has no character development, either.
One plot point interested me the most, but that was only set up in this book to be fulfilled in the third one, which goes back to what I said about Independent Study feeling like a filler book. Every major plot element is like that. By chapter 15, with only five chapters left, I was wondering how anything could get resolved when nothing had even really started.
Rated: Mild. Profanity includes only one or two instances of mild language; sexual content is nothing more than kissing, and it’s never described in detail; violence/gore includes some death, injuries, and mentions of blood, but nothing too graphic.
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