Sloane and James are on the run after barely surviving the suicide epidemic and The Program. But they’re not out of danger. Huge pieces of their memories are still missing, and although Sloane and James have found their way back to each other, The Program isn’t ready to let them go.

Escaping with a group of troubled rebels, Sloane and James will have to figure out who they can trust, and how to take down The Program. But for as far as they’ve come, there’s still a lot Sloane and James can’t remember. The key to unlocking their past lies with the Treatment—a pill that can bring back forgotten memories, but at a high cost. And there’s only one dose.

Ultimately when the stakes are at their highest, can Sloane and James survive the many lies and secrets surrounding them, or will The Program claim them in the end?

Picking up right where The Program left off, Sloane and James are on the run from The Program and find a group of rebels who are also on the run. The writing of this sequel is just as gripping as the first, which kept my interest and made it easy to blast through 100 pages per reading session. However, this story does fall a little short compared to its predecessor. 

I love Sloane and James just as much as I did in the last book, and their struggle with whether one of them should take the Treatment or not shows how much they love each other. So for the time being, neither of them takes it, but they keep it on hand just in case. After all, it’d be weird if one of them remembered their past while the other didn’t. 

What I really enjoyed in this book was figuring out who Sloane and James could really trust. Realm had already broken Sloane’s trust before, yet he’s aiding the rebels. Dallas and Cas seem to be trustworthy, but then again, they’re new characters so who really knows? It pretty much feels as though Sloane and James are on their own, even when they’re among others.

“It’s taken me all this time, all this loss, to realize what really matters is now.”

There were some good twists in this book that I definitely would not have guessed would happen. Those twists were what kept me hooked. And throughout the story we get some extra background on how The Program started and how the Treatment came to be. However, parts of the book felt rushed, especially the ending. It just all came together a little too quickly to seem real.

Overall, it’s an okay sequel to The Program. The writing is still gripping, which is why I kept on reading (and wanting to know how this duology played out), but the story itself fell short for me. 

Rating: 3/5 stars