Book Review: The Thousandth Floor

Synopsis:

A hundred years in the future, New York is a city of innovation and dreams. But people never change: everyone here wants something…and everyone has something to lose.

Leda Cole’s flawless exterior belies a secret addiction—to a drug she never should have tried and a boy she never should have touched.

Eris Dodd-Radson’s beautiful, carefree life falls to pieces when a heartbreaking betrayal tears her family apart.

Rylin Myers’s job on one of the highest floors sweeps her into a world—and a romance—she never imagined…but will her new life cost Rylin her old one?

Watt Bakradi is a tech genius with a secret: he knows everything about everyone. But when he’s hired to spy by an upper-floor girl, he finds himself caught up in a complicated web of lies.

And living above everyone else on the thousandth floor is Avery Fuller, the girl genetically designed to be perfect. The girl who seems to have it all—yet is tormented by the one thing she can never have.

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Review

I buddy read this book with my friend Jess and although we both weren’t into it in the beginning the last 100 pages sucked us in and now we both need to read the sequel.

When I first began reading I felt like this novel had way too many POVs and I still felt that way until I got to the end and realized why all those POVs were essential. To me Watt was the most unnecessary POV and I liked him the least out of all the characters we followed. Eris was my favorite, I liked Rylin but hated all her bad decisions, Avery annoyed me because of how she handled her problems, and I went from feeling sympathetic towards Leda to hating her. There was a lot going on in this novel but like I said the way Katharine McGee was able to bring everything together in the end saved this novel for me.

This book definitely gave me Gossip Girl vibes. Jess and I kept comparing these characters to the characters of Gossip Girl and began referring to Watt as Lonely Boy because he’s honestly exactly like the TV show version of Dan. Spoilers if you haven’t seen the show but Dan was Gossip Girl and in The Thousandth Floor Watt’s hacker name is Nadia. There’s a lot of other reasons why they’re similar but I don’t want to go into too much detail and spoil it but they’re very alike. Trust me. However, once again, what differentiated this book for me, besides the fact that it takes place in the future, was the surprising end.

One of my big issues with the novel, however, was trying to wrap my head around this world McGee created. When I first thought about the tower I thought of it like the Empire State Building but as I kept reading I realized it wasn’t like that at all. Apparently the Tower covers most of Manhattan and there’s buildings within the tower as well as streets and parks. So for a while I thought that meant all of New York City was the tower but then Eris and her friend, Mariel, went to a party outside of the Tower so I had to wrap my head around that. It was just a bit confusing for me and I struggled to understand the setting.

As I’ve said the plot is what really made this book awesome for me. It did start slow and I was annoyed with each character at least once in this book because they either did something stupid or I could foresee what they were planning backfiring on them. Despite that, McGee did write some good romances and like I said the last 100 pages really made the book worthwhile for me. I definitely plan on buying this one and reading the next book. I need to know what happens next!

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