The First Twenty by Jennifer Lavoie

There's no future without trust in a world where you can't survive on your own.

3 Stars



This ebook was a free sample from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

The story takes places in a Post-Apocalyptic world. Humanity is now mostly either trying to use what is left to settle down and try to build up new lifes or they try to survive as Scavengers. Groups of people who wander and steal the things they need.

Peyton lives in a rather well-off settlement. Her adopted father, the first in command gets killed by Scavengers and Peyton swears to take revenge on whoever is responsible for it. Soon after she is voted as successor of her father the Scavengers break into a hall, trying to steal something.
As they try to flee one of them gets hurt and captured.

The girl they capture, Nixie, has the ability to sense water, something everybody believes to be a story told by the few travellers that pass trough their settlement. Nixie keeps her ability a secret though, she wants to go back to her folks and letting the settlers know about her ability would be very much counterproductive.

The only problem for Nixie is that the people are too friendly to her, a captive scavenger who isn't treated as one, and that she starts to care for them way more than is good for her escape plan.

Peyton suffers from a similiar. She should be more wary of their pretty captive. Instead she finds herself drawn to Nixie and they both learn an important lesson from each other. That maybe Settlers and Scavengers have a wrong image from one another. That maybe they can have a different future than they believed to be possible up to that point.


The synopsis of the book was different but the picture it gave me was quite different from what I actually got. I expected much more action and suspence. Aside from that the world building wasn't very convincing. The reader barely gets any details, enough to know what happened but not enough to make you see the world.