Meh. 
 Can't say I understand why this book is so popular. The initial idea was intriguing, but I found the world-building to be phoned-in, a set up just to bolster the very mediocre and tedious romance between the two main characters. There was only a few signs of true dystopian technology, everything else was pretty much normal and boring. Not a lot of explanation or even speculation on what happened to bring society to the place it was today. Nope. And any time we got close, it dovetailed back into the silly romance. 
 Spoilers below... 
 That romance was based on nothing except initial attraction, and somehow by the end of the book we are supposed to to believe that their True Love is so strong as to overcome the evil mind control technology, for no reason whatsoever. They barely know each other, at that point... And the book ends with them snogging in front of his abusive father and her brother, after she watches her mother and father die a violent death and all of her friends forced to execute people. 
 The supporting characters, even the main characters, were rather cookie-cutter and undeveloped. They felt boring to me and I wasn't much moved by their fates. 
 The plot was predictable, but at least it was mostly coherent, which is why this gets two stars. That's more than I can say of a lot of YA on the market today. 
 One last thing-- you'd think for a book that relied so much on guns and marksmanship for its plot and action scenes, that the author would learn the basics of how they work and how they are used in an actual gun battle. Not that those mistakes are at all uncommon, either. 
 I definitely won't be continuing with the series. Maybe we'll get more explanation and better world building in the next books, but I wasn't thrilled enough with this one to continue. Frankly, I don't care what happens to Beatrice.