I read Unspoken because a friend recommended it and it sounded interesting. However, I read it almost a year ago and now that I am sitting down to write about it, I can’t remember much of anything. I feel like that’s significant right there. I remember it being okay enough to go through but not so great that I wanted to read the others. I think part of the problem is that I’ve spent a bunch of time reading a lot of Young Adult books and now that I have read enough, new ones don’t impress me as much as the old ones used to. So my bar is higher.
And while this wasn’t disappointing, it also didn’t really pass the bar enough to make me read the next books in the series.
I totally get wha you mean about a higher standard – while I’d read the hunger games again, or divergent, I’m not sure I’d read the selection again. But it’s interesting to see the variety of YA/distopian fiction that keeps being published, and exploring the genre.