A young adult dystopia in much the same vein as The Hunger Games. The United States has been decimated by war which has left the majority of the planet a ruined wasteland. Cia Vale lives in a society attempting to rebuild by recruiting elite students, the country's best and brightest, to become future thinkers and leaders. However, chosen students must first pass and survive a gruelling and deadly series of tests. 
 I didn't mind this book, but I do have to admit that it's not very ground-breaking or unique in the oversaturated young adult dystopia genre. Where The Hunger Games is exciting and fast paced and heartbreaking I found The Testing to be comparatively slow and lacking in that emotional nuance or depth to really help it stand out from the crowd. There is a lot that is quite formulaic about this world, from the stirrings of rebellion to the 1984 style monitoring and the generic dystopian, somewhat totalitarian government system as well as the typical cookie-cutter romance. I'm also not quite sure the reasoning behind such a brutal and deadly testing system? It seems somewhat illogical to me to select only the most intelligent students and then effectively massacre such a huge percentage. I'm kind of assuming this question will be answered in the sequels? Once the testing candidates are sent out into the wilderness in a kind of survivalist death match it begins to feel even more like The Hunger Games, but without that powerful sense of tension and emotion Suzanne Collins achieves. I actually found that this aspect of the plot dragged quite a lot and I started to skim read massive sections where the characters were simply walking or riding to the finish for pages at a time. However, I did enjoy Cia as a character, she's smart and strong and brave (ie. Katniss), and there was just enough intrigue in the plot to keep me interested and engaged. 
 Overall, enjoyable but not revolutionary. There are enough unanswered questions that have me curious to see where this series goes.