Golden Dreg Boy by D.K. Dailey: review

3/5 stars on Goodreads

Golden Dreg Boy by D.K. Dailey

Golden Dreg Boy: Book 1, the Slums by D.K. Dailey is a post-apocalyptic YA sci-fi that takes place in near future San Francisco. I got a free copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The book is set in a society wiped out by highly deadly diseases; an unfortunate premise in the current world, as even the casual reader is suddenly an expert in pandemics and herd immunology. The society is divided into two to the golden, who have money and power, but have lost their immunity to diseases (the science behind this seems to be based on the author’s faulty understanding of vaccines and immunology), and the poor dregs who have somehow acquired congenital immunity to all diseases in basically a generation. Even if you accept the idea of hereditary immunity, which I don’t, the result of this divide would most likely be that the totalitarian regime described in the book would force the dregs to breed with the golden to boost up their immunity. Instead, the two are segregated and if a dreg manages to pretend to be golden, they are instantly sentenced to death. For their part, the dregs would have a bartering chip with their genes they could use to get themselves better living conditions. None of this happens. Fiction is fiction, but I’d like it to make sense within its own world.

As it was, some suspension of disbelief was required to get through the book. The main character is Kade, a teenager from the top of the golden hierarchy—and there is a hierarchy. Everything is going well for him until out of the blue—and it’s truly that—he’s arrested as a dreg infiltrator and sentenced to death without a trial. To his shock, his family isn’t there to rescue him, but the dregs are. He’s given a new life among them and in a true manner of YA fiction questions everything he’s known to be true and learns he’s been living in a lie. The betrayal of his family makes him eager to help his new people to bring down the golden. The book is a bit too long for its plot, but well-written enough to help through the slow bits.

I didn’t like Kade much. He came across like a condescending teenage jerk in the beginning, interested only in breasts and kissing, and I couldn’t get over the initial impression. Other characters were a bit two dimensional and their presence didn’t improve him, and I couldn’t fathom his fascination with Saya. It says a lot about my feelings that I sort of rooted for the twist that happened in the end. But it helped him to get over himself, so maybe he’ll be more interesting in the next book.