Trigger warnings: At its core, The Sandcastle Empire is a survival story so there is a lot of violence and stressful survival situations within the book.
Synopsis: Before the war, Eden’s life was easy—air conditioning, ice cream, long days at the beach. Then the revolution happened, and everything changed.
Now a powerful group called the Wolfpack controls the earth and its resources. Eden has lost everything to them. They killed her family and her friends, destroyed her home, and imprisoned her. But Eden refuses to die by their hands. She knows the coordinates to the only neutral ground left in the world, a place called Sanctuary Island, and she is desperate to escape to its shores.
Eden finally reaches the island and meets others resistant to the Wolves. But their solace is short-lived when one of Eden’s new friends goes missing. Braving the jungle in search of their lost ally, they quickly discover Sanctuary is filled with lethal traps and an enemy they never expected.
This island might be deadlier than the world Eden left behind, but surviving it is the only thing that stands between her and freedom.
Review: I love survival stories, but I don't read enough of them. I didn't know what The Sandcastle Empire was supposed to be when I picked it up. It seemed like it was supposed to be dystopian-esque, but I was pleased to find it more like a survival book. Unfortunately, my excitement dwindled quickly. I didn't care about a single character, and I thought it was odd that these characters didn't know each other but they suddenly trusted Eden with some of their secrets early on. I liked seeing Eden's internal struggle when she thought about the relationships she was forming with this group, but she also knew things about her dad that made the world what it became. None of the other characters felt important and I didn't care when they were on the page.
I think a lot of my problems with the story would have been resolved if this was set up differently. We don't really have any context except some group called the Wolfpack is in charge and Eden is trapped. She somehow escapes to an island that she realizes isn't the safe haven she once believed it was. We don't spend enough time under the Wolfpack's reign to get a feel for them and their control. This gets even more confusing when HoloWolves become a thing. I genuinely can't tell you what they are supposed to be. I just stopped caring. We do get a few moments of Eden thinking about her time "Before" but that still doesn't give us enough context to sympathize with her. There are also things like Havenwater which is specific to this world, but we don't really get an explanation of what this world is like and how these things work within it. Then the dystopian aspect kicked in again and there was suddenly an alliance and an uprising which, shocker, none of which I cared about. Again, I like survival stories a lot. I don't think this needed to have any weird elements to try to raise the stakes or keep the story going. Just following Eden as she navigated a new area and tried to survive would have been enough for me.
A bummer, but a disappointing read.
2 howls
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