Jason Luthor

An infestation of the Creep has taken over the world. A living, reactive, muscle-like, goop, the Creep has spread out over the surface of the Earth and forced the remaining people to the higher levels of tall towers. When you touch the Creep or live around it, the Creep can give you hallucinations and make you see demons out of the corners of your eye. However, the deeper you go into the Creep, the more dangerous it becomes. The Creep has the ability to entangle a person and dissolve them. show more With humans living at the top of towers, Tower Authority has emerged. The more privileged live on the top floors, while the less privileged live lower. They all follow the rules set by the top floor, Floor 1. Jackie lives on Floor 4. She is super inquisitive and wants to know all about the Tower, the Creep and the world outside that she has never seen. However, none of this is allowed. Jackie would love nothing more than to be a Scavenger, those who go to the lower, uninhabited levels to find supplies and food to bring up to people. Jackie's friend Mike and her hero, Vick are Scavengers, but they have to keep going lower and lower to find things, this Scavenging though, Mike wants to try to find the source of the Creep's power and eliminate it.

This is a YA dystopia book with a splash of horror. I was very intrigued by the idea of the Creep, a different and unique threat that caused a trying set of circumstances for those in the Tower. The story is told through a series of recordings, first by Jackie, then by Vick, then Jackie again. Jackie has a lot of questions that she isn't even supposed to be asking, so the recorder is a good outlet for her. Jackie's character is a bit typical for a teenager, but her investigative skills and bravery are commendable. She does end up figuring out some things about the Creep and the Tower itself. Vick's recording were very enjoyable for me, he was literally in the thick of the Creep with his Scavenging team and the action and danger really picked up. There are still a lot of questions left to be answered, such as: Where did the Creep come from? Is there anyone else out there in the world? How long have people been forced up into Towers? and How the heck are they still Scavenging meat? Overall, a fresh breath in the YA dystopian genre.

This book was received for free in return for an honest review. show less

Floor 21 by Jason Luthor is a dystopia novel and usually I don't like those but this one was very different and strange so I had to give it a try. It was certainly different and I love different. This was very good from the get-go. It is a weird story about people that live in the top floors can't come down and the reasons is very, very terrifying. A refreshingly new look at strange! Loved it!

I like the premise of this book. The idea that everyone is living in an 21 floor apartment and they can't leave their floor had me intrigued. From the moment I started reading I pictured the world that Mr. Luthor built for this book. Jackie's curiosity about the rest of the floors in the apartment rubbed off on me and got me curious. The aspect of the world kept me reading even though the first half of the story was really all about the talking...talking about the building and talking about show more the people. Yet the second half of the story made up for the first half. This is where Jackie ventured around the apartment building and I was exposed to just what was beyond the other floors. You could say the pacing was faster involving more action. This is a good read. I do look forward to checking out other books by this author. show less

The author kindly sent me this book last year, and I was super excited to read it, but with one thing and another... it took me until now to get to it.

I was looking forward to reading it, because Floor 21 sounded like a really nice twist to the dystopia genre, which I got hooked on when I read the Hunger Games series.

Unfortunately, the main character, Jackie, isn't very likable, and worse yet, I think the author fell far short in trying to write a young female character, and there were a show more lot of character traits that were exact opposites, which drove me crazy (for example: she keeps whining at one point pretty early on in the book, about how she wants to date, but yet when a perfectly nice boy asks her out, she's extremely rude to him. It's later explained that the boy teased her ONCE a million years ago, and that's why Jackie is so rude to him.). Jackie's supposedly SO smart, yet she talks like she's 10, has the maturity of a 12 year old, and whines like a 2 year old.

It also drove me crazy that Jackie repeatedly mentions playing baseball with her father in her younger days, but it's never explained exactly how one is playing baseball in a building with limited resources and space. On the roof where the garden is? Yeah, I'm sure a community starving to death is going to leave space for a small baseball field instead of growing more food.

And then halfway through the book, instead of hearing from Jackie, the character voice switches, which did not work for me at all (even though I was not a Jackie fan). I think if the author had wanted to switch voices, he should have switched voices way earlier in the book, perhaps alternating voices like most authors do when dealing with this?

I did really like the fact that Floor 21 is a very unique dystopian world, I liked all the mystery surrounding the storyline, and there are some very interesting scenes that did keep me reading, the book was well edited and written, but overall, the book just did not work for me. show less