Review: Revolution 19

Revolution 19 by Gregg Rosenblum
Age Group: Young Adult
Genre: Science Fiction, Post-Apocalyptic, Dystopian
Release Date: January 8th, 2013 by Harper Teen


Twenty years ago, the robots designed to fight our wars abandoned the battlefields. Then they turned their weapons on us.

Only a few escaped the robot revolution of 2071. Kevin, Nick, and Cass are lucky —they live with their parents in a secret human community in the woods. Then their village is detected and wiped out. Hopeful that other survivors have been captured by bots, the teens risk everything to save the only people they have left in the world—by infiltrating a city controlled by their greatest enemies.

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Revolution 19 starts off 14 years after the robots made for fighting human wars rebelled and killed off most of humanity, keeping a percentage of them alive in the cities. The survivors have banded together to form various freeposts where daily life activities are for survival and staying hidden from the bots. The three main characters are siblings Nick, Cass and Kevin that fall into what was termed the second gens as they were too young to remember life before or were born after.

Kevin as the youngest is the tech genius of the group, Cass was adopted into the family after her parents were killed and Nick is the oldest and feels he doesn’t belong with the first gens as they ignore his ideas, but he’s too old to fit with the younger kids. It was nice that there wasn’t just one main character and that they each had their importance. When their Freepost is attacked by bots, they head to the nearest city to find their parents. Once in the City there is challenge after challenge involved in staying hidden from the bots and how to escape. They are aided by several citizens, including Lexi and Farryn who were around their age.


I really enjoyed the fast paced nature of this book as there wasn’t too much time wasted on getting right into the action. It was easy to tell that they were always in life or death situations in the City so there was something happening to keep me entertained. At the same time this was something that after finishing, I wish had been a bit slower and more elaborate.

There was a lot of fighting going on between the siblings, which was the same stuff throughout the book mostly along the lines and Nick stating that this was too dangerous he’d be the one to do it and Kevin needed to be quiet and obey and Kevin would yell back, “We have to fight!”

Also the romances or not-romances, I’m not really sure what to call the stuff going on between the freeposters and some of the city kids was either not enough or too much because it felt out of place. Also, while I am one for tech in sci-fi books the was it was introduced, usually spurted out by Kevin was sections that I usually just skimmed to the end on.

I had mentioned this book back when I did the Turn off the TV and Read for Battlestar Galactica and was really looking forward to reading this, but it really didn’t live up to its hype and isn’t one I’d recommend unless you’re really wanting to read a book with robots.

Side note the book trailer for this is really good if slightly misleading and if this had gone more towards a movie script than a novel that would have been better.