Level 2 by Lenore Appelhans — 288 pgs

When Felicia is killed in a terrible accident, her bright future is cut short. But death isn’t the end for Felicia, as she has woken up inside a hive of blinding and pristine whiteness. There are others inside the hive, and as they stumble about numbed and forgetful, it seems the only thing that keeps them going is plugging into their separate memory chambers to relive bits and pieces of their lives over and over again. Though Felicia can’t remember much outside of her chamber, she forms a bond with two girls inside her hive and tries to understand what has happened to her. One day, after groggily exiting her chamber with her companions, a stranger with a familiar face seems to penetrate the very walls that are keeping the hive together. It’s Julian, a boy Felicia never expected or wanted to see again. When Julian tells Felicia that she must escape, she’s taken on the most dangerous of journeys, hunted by the beings who are prospering from her and her friend’s memories. As Felicia and Julian get further and further away, the danger becomes more and more apparent, for the sheer unstoppable forces that the enemy are using to hold her will do anything to keep her. But as Felicia and Julian advance, memories of her life come more clearly into focus, and in a place where she can trust only one person, can it be that Julian cannot be trusted at all? In Level 2, Lenore Appelhans gives us a frightening look into the  world between here and heaven, and takes us to the brink of uncertainty through the use of magic, myth and religion in a potent and terrifying thriller that guarantees you will never think of heaven in quite the same way again.

In a white and sterile world, there is life. This is where the story begins, and through flashbacks the author sets up a vast and foreboding set of circumstances that will gradually reveal how Felicia died and where she ended up. As the energy from her memories is being siphoned off, it’s almost like a puzzle to decipher why someone would want to do something like this and why the people around her can’t remember even the basics about themselves or how they got to where they are.

In Applehans’ world, there is a deep symbiotic relationship between the darkness and the light, the powerful and the powerless, and the agents of evil and peace. As Felicia becomes more and more aware of what’s happening around her, she suffers terrible losses and must learn to cooperate with the devil she knows versus the one she doesn’t. This is a complex tangle of science, mysticism and spirituality that seems to defy any box that you can put it into. It’s textured and layered storytelling of the best kind, the type of tale that both compels you to delve deeper into chasm it’s created and to pull away from the darkness that is engulfing everything that Felicia knows and loves.

Even as Julian is saving Felicia, one wonders what his true motives are and what he’s hiding. He seems amiable and sincere, but there’s something hiding underneath, and the group that he has allied with aren’t the nicest sort. As I read, I wondered if there was more to Julian’s saving Felicia than he had asserted, and surely it seemed as though the more I learned about him, the easier it was to distrust him. But the author has a few aces up her sleeve when it comes to the true motives of this character, and the circumstances get even more surreal by the end of the novel.

In Felicia’s heart, there’s only room for one: the one whom she left behind. But the closer she comes to the terrible beings that are holding her and innumerable others prisoner, the closer she comes to the truth about the love she left behind and her life before Level 2. In the perfectly pitched and highly tense narrative, Felicia will find out more than she ever wanted to know, and she’ll have to make a choice that will affect not only her own soul, but that of those around her who are still slumbering in their hives, dreaming of the lives that they will never be a part of again.

I enjoyed this book to the fullest and found myself  speculating on character motives, wondering what was coming next, and actively engaging with the cast of very three-dimensional characters that Appelhans created. I was sucked into this white world that suddenly turned vivid and uncannily haunting, and was just as ensnared with the careful and compelling rendition of the plot. I’m eagerly looking forward to seeing what the author brings me next in her second installment, Level 3. A top notch YA novel. Highly recommended.

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This book was provided as a complimentary review copy.