This month I have the pleasure of joining the CSFF Blog tour (Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy). The book featured is Captives by Jill Williamson.
Captives is a dystopia novel that revolves around a futuristic world where most humans live inside a walled city known as the Safe Lands. These humans, however, are infected with disease that has made them sterile. So now they are searching outside their city for uninfected blood by which to reproduce the human population.
Outside the Safe Lands are pockets of uninfected humans who live in small, rural communities. The protagonists of Captives are three teen brothers who live in one such community. The youngest brother longs for something more than the bare life he has and a chance to please his harsh father. So when an opportunity comes up for him to leave the outside and join the Safe Lands, he takes it. Unfortunately, he doesn’t realize that by doing so, he has turned his entire community over to the Safe Lands to be breed for future human beings. The middle brother is captured by the Safe Lands and the oldest seeks a way inside to save both his people and his fiancée.
I really enjoyed Captives. The feel of the book reminded me of the Syfy show Defiance and The Hunger Games. The three different brothers and their story arcs were interesting to follow; each one presented a different picture of the Safe Lands and their own place in their family (the beloved oldest brother, the smart middle brother, the artsy youngest brother who doesn’t fit in).
I highly recommended Captives for teen readers and up who enjoy futuristic dystopia novels.
To find out more about Captives and what others on this tour had to say, click on the links below!
In conjunction with the CSFF Blog Tour, I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.
Morgan L. Busse 
Morgan, thanks for your review. Your comparison of the three brothers made a good point that not everyone is alike; even in the same family. One of the things I enjoyed about Captives was the characterization. Just like in life, everyone has faults. By the end of the book, I wondered if Omar wasn’t all bad, just misled by easy solutions to his problems.
Timothy
Whoo-hoo! A tour with Morgan. We’re glad to have you. Since this is where we first “met”, I had to give you a shout out here. Gotta love Jill’s work.