Graduation Day
Spoilers for the first 30ish pages:
To be honest, Graduation Day didn’t have the best start. The thing that really bothered me the most about the beginning was how President Collindar decides that a sixteen year old girl is the best person to go about assassinating members of government. Her reasoning for Cia being the best choice are simply because Collindar can’t trust anyone she’s working with to do the job (which is a valid point) and because she has an idea of what Cia may have done to pass The Testing.
I think my main problem with this part in the book can be due to the fact that Cia is only sixteen. I suppose that the thought that Cia might have killed during The Testing could help her be okay with going around and murdering people. However, I cannot understand why the president would think that having a more or less random girl go around killing important people is a good idea.
As for the rest of the book, to me it felt like nothing really happened. Or rather, all the events ran together in my mind. I didn’t feel that anything was truly surprising, not even when the president did ask Cia to essentially become an assassin. If I did more in-depth thinking about the book while I was reading, I probably would have found it very predictable. None of the events seemed at all surprising even though it’s clear that the author was trying to make it so.
All in all, I didn’t hate this book, but I didn't love it either. I liked it well enough but it didn’t leave much of an impression on me and I wasn't too terribly concerned with what was happening to the characters because I knew, one way or another, Cia would complete her mission and The Testing would come to an end.
Honestly, if this book hadn’t been sitting on my shelf (as well as being borrowed from a friend at that) I probably wouldn’t have read it or at least not anytime soon. The entire series, while not really a disappointment or a chore to read, wasn’t exciting to me. It held my attention while I was reading, but I was mainly reading them just to finish them so I could return them to my friend.