Review: The Point by John Dixon

The Point by John Dixon
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This was OK. I had much higher expectations for this and didn't end up loving it. I think it is a great YA urban fantasy/sci-fi book. I just couldn't connect with the characters or the storyline. I felt like the characters were much to immature for my reading tastes and the pacing was too slow for my liking. I think young adult readers will really enjoy this story and really love Scarlett.

Scarlett Winter is a selfish, brat who doesn't care about anyone but herself and doesn't care if her actions hurt anyone. She doesn't apply herself at school, sports, or pretty much anything even though she is bright, athletic, and compeltely capable. She just doesn't care about anything enough to apply herself. After getting in trouble one to many times, her father is ready to ship her off to the Army. Scarlett wants to go backpacking through Europe instead. This causes yet another family fued, but this time her older brother is involved. Their dad abused Scarlett's brother Dan, who turned the abuse onto her as they got older. This time when Dan starts a fight with Scarlett, she hits him back with more force than should be possible. This isn't the first time Scarlett has done something out of the ordinary. Scarlett decides to lay low after the family fight and crash a friends graduation party when she happens upon and stops a terrorist bombing. Enter Colonel Rhodes from West Point, he is aware that Scarlett may have superhuman or posthuman powers and those powers can be honed at The Point, as secret school with West Point.

Scarlett isn't left with many options at this point, take the blame for the bombing or join the Army and learn to control her powers. She chooses door number 2 and becomes a Cadet. Army life does not suit stubborn, outspoken, rebel Scarlett, but she quickly finds her place at The Point with people who understand her. While Scarlett is learning how to harness her powers, there are a rouge group of posthumans that want to eradicate non-posthumans. This part feels kind of rushed at the end of the book, and is very chaotic. The bad guy, Jagger, incites chaos which is part of the action, but it was hard for me to keep track of what was going on. The book takes quite a while to introduce you to Jagger, then it is all over in a few chapters. The buildup was pretty significant for the small amount of action we get. I just wanted more action from a book like this, they spend a lot of time at school training.

As far as the book goes, I wanted a little more character development. As I stated earlier, I didn’t connect with any of the characters. I didn’t like Scarlett at all, she was kind of selfish, jerk and while she is the heroine she never really redeems herself in my opinion. I feel like she will always be selfish and disrespectful. There are plenty of side characters, but I needed more from all of them. The plot was decent; I really liked the combination of the military academy with the idea of the posthuman. I think young adult readers will really enjoy this. It has some decent humor and puts a unique spin on super human powers that I haven't read before.

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