What if you had 30 seconds to decide your future? But there’s a catch, you must give up everything.

After failing a test that decides a person’s rank in society, the protagonist of Pawn by Aimee Carter, Kitty, believes she has nothing left to live for. That is, until she is given a new chance at life; she can become a VII, a rank reserved for the upper class of society. However, this is only possible if she literally changes who she is and undergoes plastic surgery to become the Prime Minister’s recently deceased niece.

Pawn is the perfect combination of a romance and science fiction novel. The plot twists and betrayals throughout keep the reader on edge. Carter’s characters give the reader a sense of deja vu, as if you’d known them your whole life, instead of only for the 346 pages.

The characters in the story are believable in that they are not painted as people who act like the world revolves around them; they seem just to be regular people.  Many of the characters are not described leaving room for imagination and not wasting any of the reader’s time, contributing to the novel’s fast pace. As the story unfolds, it becomes darker and more twisted. By the end of the novel, there are more questions than answers, leaving the reader wanting more. Pawn is not a novel to be taken lightly, but it will definitely challenge and please the thrillseeker.