I really had a hard time with this book. I wouldn’t say I hated it but it absolutely wasn’t love. There are some great things about the book but as a whole the bad outweighed the good. I did like the dystopian trope, it just could have been executed better. There haven’t been many popular dystopian books lately and I have to say I did kinda miss the trope. That said the timing of the release was interesting considering it is a post pandemic world released in 2020 during the height of the Covid crisis. I know of another author with a book that involves a pandemic that has chosen to delay her release until the current pandemic situation clears up and while I desperately want that book I do respect that decision and think the choice to keep the release date of The Key to Fear may have been a tad bit in poor taste.
Set 50 years after 90% of the worlds population is decimated, we find a world where touch of any kind is illegal and technology has flourished. I feel like only 50 years post pandemic was a poor decision as it makes many aspects of the society unbelievable. 50 years would not be long enough for people to lose a sex drive as well the biological and emotional drive to seek physical touch. Especially when there are still people around from pre-pandemic times. As far as the technology, yes 50 years is a long time when talking about tech but with only 10% of humanity surviving it’s really unrealistic to think they would have the talents and labor force to advance that quickly.
When we get to the characters themselves they really fall flat for me. Elodie is just boring. The most interesting thing about her is she……takes a shower? Aiden is the most interesting of the 3 main characters by far. He actually has his own thoughts and some personality. Unfortunately he also gets the least “screen time” of all of them it seems. Finally we get to Blair, a hollow shell of a character really. It reads like her character exists solely to push radical feminism. Don’t get me wrong, I love me some girl power in books but when she would go off on feminist ranting tangents that had zero to so with the plot it just felt forced and out of place. Once you have removed her feminist rants there really just wasn’t much left to her. Then it got really bad when this strongly feminist character blames the other female lead of being nothing but a harlot with a pretty face leading the poor man astray with her feminine wiles because there was no way he would possibly ever do what he did by his own volition. It just felt a little bit like victim blaming.
There is also an issue with plot points being completely dropped. The whole missing patient and medical experimentation plot line just seems to get completely forgotten. The books blurb pretty much covers the whole extent of the book. I really thought we would get to see them actually on the run and fighting back but that wasn’t the case. The end of the book is right there in the blurb and that’s a bit disappointing and a failure in pacing.
Overall it wasn’t a great read by any stretch of the imagination. My need to complete books and series is probably the only thing that will make me pick up the next in the series.
