The Collector by Laura Kat Young is a dystopian novel with a unique twist. One thing I was glad for was how short the book was. It is pretty depressing, which I’m glad for, but it didn’t feel as if it brought anything new to the table. As with the majority of similar dystopian societies, Big Brother is always watching, and, as you can guess, it’s no different here. The one saving point for the story revolves around how we get to follow the protagonist around in collecting a person’s donation of their fondest memory prior to being reset and given a new chance at life. We see once again how The Collector reuses the theme of emotional suppression in a dystopian society for the betterment of society itself. Anyone caught outside the norms is considered dangerous, contagious, and, as you can once again guess, sent off either to be reconditioned or sent out to pasture.

The story does start off interesting for the most part, and that is due to Dev being somewhat aware of how messed up his society is and performing what amounts to a rebellious act. From there, it just gets from bad to depressing. I had wanted to spend more time with the memory collection part of the story, but I felt that portion could have been better with more pages dedicated to it. The second part of the book took up too many pages, in my opinion, but amounted to what I believe was a cliché and totally predictable outcome in the end.

In a way, The Collector reminded me of the novel by Justin Cronin, The Ferryman but with much less suspense and character developments. One of the words that can best describe this novel to me is probably “suffocating”. The story and environment felt very claustrophobic, to the point of the main character’s world seemingly getting closed and boxed in with each passing day. In this regard, I think the author did a great job setting up the rest of the story.