The Salt Line by Holly Goddard Jones

The Salt Line by Holly Goddard Jones
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In a dystopian future citizens live in fear in protected burned out areas beyond the salt line for protection from ticks that have begun to spread a disease that kills in mere seconds. Extreme thrill seekers can still venture out beyond the protection into the wild by paying a high sum to an adventure company. The company then trains the adventure seekers as to what to expect beyond the salt line and how to fend in the wild.

The latest group of adventure seekers have teamed up and trained to go out into nature on their adventure but what awaited them was more than they ever would have expected when the deadly disease-carrying ticks become the least of their worries. Ambushed by a group with guns the wealthy travelers are taken hostage and find themselves captives in Ruby City, a community made up of outer-zone survivors that none of them knew existed.

The Salt Line by Holly Goddard Jones is a book that I honestly expected to fall in love with but in the end ended up thinking this one was just an OK read. There were things in here that I really liked such as the plot in which the ticks have gotten so bad that people are hiding in safe areas. I mean come on, who hasn’t seen on the news lately that ticks are even more dangerous these days, between the ticks and mosquito stories one would think maybe we do need burned out insect free areas. But the author took the story beyond that initial fear and went into much more so it actually had a bit more depth in that regard than I was expecting.

But as for the downside to this one I don’t think that I was a huge fan of the style in which the story was written. The author chose to follow multiple characters and even the further you got there are more characters that are brought into the book and more drama piled on so there was a bit of a disconnect as far as connecting with any specific person or people on a deeper level. I also thought that the flashing back to learn of what led characters to get to where they were in the story didn’t always flow well the way it was done. Not that any of this made the book terrible, just ended up being one that I wasn’t totally in love with when finished.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via Edelweiss.