The Chosen Twelve by James Breakwell

Hello everyone! It's time for my first blog tour of 2022 and I'm kicking it off with a review of The Chosen Twelve by James Breakwell. After a long stint of reading purely fantasy, I finally picked up a sci-fi/dystopian book! The Chosen Twelve was kindly sent to me as part of Lola's Blog Tours and I have to say, I am very grateful for this tour for introducing me to this little gem of a book.

The Chosen Twelve is set on a base on a distant planet, where the last 22 members of the human race (organics) are being trained to one day rebuild human civilization, under there instruction of digitals (robots). The teaching mainly takes part in simulations of real-life scenarios and reading about these was so fun. It brought a great futuristic feel with real entertainment factor. In this world, the digitals call the shots, putting organics through their paces and selecting what profession each organic will train as in order to give humanity the best chance. But the digitals have other plans for the organics too....

The members of the base are named according to the Greek alphabet and this was a very clever way of building the characters. At the beginning of the book, I very much saw the characters as just numbers but as I read on, they started to show their personalities and each character was so distinctly different. This really nicely represented the human race and gave a good indiction into the differences in how humans and machines value the beautiful parts of human individuality. The interactions between the organics also felt really authentic, by the means of cliques forming and personality clashes.

As well as great characters and an intense story of restarting humanity, we also follow a war between the digitals and the organics. This felt very relevant and current, adding a bit of a deeper thinking aspect to the read. I loved the idea of robots going haywire and James was so inventive in the way that this was portrayed. The idea of 'zombie' robots actually really freaked me out!

The writing itself was entertaining and there were very humorous parts as well as scenes that were dark and hard-hitting. There were killer kangaroos, wolf sharks and war elephants with weaponized diarrihea! If that doesn’t intrigue you, I don’t know what will!! Although I’ve stated that the book represented all of the beautiful aspects of humanity, it also addressed the darker side to all of us and the impact of the situation on our ugly roots.

Overall this was fun and thought-provoking at the same time and I really enjoyed reading! I recommend it to fans of The Hunger Games and Arc of the Scythe! I hope James writes some more fun and futuristic books!