I'd give this three or four stars for premise, but the writing was so bad, I can't give it more than two overall. If I'd been tasked to edit this book, I'd have rewritten it completely. 
 I had two major problems with the writing. The first was the author's insistence on telling me things vs. showing them. Show me that Thomas is frustrated instead of constantly repeating the phrase "Thomas was extremely frustrated!" 
 The other was the author's love of his world's vocabulary, from the fake swearing to the Endless Series of Needlessly Capitalized Nouns. A certain amount of this can be effective in making a fantasy world seem real, but the Words were used excessively and then overexplained. If characters are constantly calling each other "klunkhead" and then someone has to clean up the "pig klunk" then I do not require several sentences explaining that klunk is poop, as the protagonist has this revelation. Same with the Nouns. The worst was when Thomas was told that the leaders were calling "a Gathering," and he wondered what in the world that could be. Really? I understand his memory had been mostly wiped, but he seemed to remember most words in the English language, so did he hear the capitalization and suspect it was something other than a meeting? I realize this is a YA book, but give the readers some credit. 
 There were some plotting and pacing issues, too, but I was interested enough in knowing where the story was going that I mostly ignored these. I plan on reading the rest of the series, too, even though I can't imagine the author's writing improves. (One can hope, I suppose.)