Doomed

Author: Tracey Deebs
Goodreads Rating: 4.00
Pages: 480
Format: ARC from Publisher/Blog Tour for Itching for Books

Beat the game. Save the world.
Pandora’s just your average teen, glued to her cell phone and laptop, surfing Facebook and e-mailing with her friends, until the day her long-lost father sends her a link to a mysterious site featuring twelve photos of her as a child. Unable to contain her curiosity, Pandora enters the site, where she is prompted to play her favorite virtual-reality game, Zero Day. This unleashes a global computer virus that plunges the whole world into panic: suddenly, there is no Internet. No cell phones. No utilities, traffic lights, hospitals, law enforcement. Pandora teams up with handsome stepbrothers Eli and Theo to enter the virtual world of Zero Day. Simultaneously, she continues to follow the photographs from her childhood in an attempt to beat the game and track down her father, her one key to saving the world as we know it. Part The Matrix, part retelling of the Pandora myth, Doomed has something for gaming fans, dystopian fans, and romance fans alike.

I am so glad that they changed the cover from the one that they gave me on the ARC because, with the original cover, I would never have picked it up. I had anticipated this book to take me days to get through, but it wound up being a really quick and easy read. I loved how quickly you were pulled into Pandora's world the same way that the characters were pulled into the game.

I kept expecting there to be more to the brothers, Eli and Theo, intentions, but it doesn't appear that they have ulterior motives to helping Pandora get out of this mess. I did feel that both brothers seemed to be too similar for my taste and I often confused them, because they both were tall and strong and fiercely protective, and seemed to have the same type of fashion. I also grew tired of the love triangle quickly, but just because Pandora didn't seem to know what she wanted.

Some of the terms that were thrown out there, I feel like you would know if you were a gamer, so I was a little confused as to what an AR was. (If anyone wants to clue me in feel free) I was also expecting that it would be more sinister and that when you died in the game, you died in real life, but it was a good thing that this was not the case.

Another thing I also liked was how everything seemed to go with Greek Mythology, and how it wasn't just about Pandora, but also the different beasts and Gods. I also liked how it related to different environmental problems including droughts, and famine as a way to show what our world could become.

I loved how the three of them worked together to try to figure out what was going on, and how each of them had their own knowledge to contribute to the race to save the world. I enjoyed the ending because it did wrap things up, but I also had a few unanswered, minor, questions. All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by this book and I look forward to more from Deebs.

The Courts Decision: