‘My name is Oscar and I am the per­fect teenager. I go out with the hottest girl in school. I get straight As. I am class president.

Oscar Banks lives in the pris­tine town of Can­dor. Son of the mayor, he is good-looking, smart and pop­u­lar. And he knows some­thing he shouldn’t — he knows about the brain­wash­ing Mes­sages embed­ded in the music that plays all over town. 

Oscar has found a way to burn counter-Messages that keep him real. Up to now, it’s all worked per­fectly. There’s just one prob­lem: Nia Silva, the newest Can­dor arrival. What will Oscar risk to keep the Nia he loves rather than watch her become a Can­dor automaton?’

This was cer­tainly a creepy lit­tle book. Out of all the dystopi­ans I’ve read recently, I think Can­dor was one of the most ter­ri­fy­ing — read­ing it there was the under­ly­ing fear that this could actu­ally hap­pen, or already be hap­pen­ing, some­where. Can­dor has clev­erly tapped into one of the great­est fears of soci­ety — the loss of free will.

When the enemy is inside your own head secretly con­trol­ling you — how do you fight back? I had to won­der just what kind of par­ents would move to a town like Can­dor just to have their dif­fi­cult teenagers brain­washed into per­fect lit­tle robots. Because the fam­i­lies that live in Can­dor aren’t there by acci­dent. They sign up for the chance to have a (seem­ingly) per­fect life. What they don’t know of course, is that there is no leav­ing Candor.

Would peo­ple really do that in real life? It never seems to occur to them that it’s not just their teenagers and chil­dren who are con­trolled, but them as well. We never learn all the Mes­sages that the Mayor puts into the music — but there are a few dis­turb­ing moments when even Oscar has no idea whether what he is say­ing are his own words, or his fathers.

Can­dor opens up a lot of inter­est­ing ques­tions but sadly, never takes the time to prop­erly explore them. How exactly do the Mes­sages work? Why are they addic­tive? Did no one ever say ‘no’ when they found out the real price of liv­ing in Can­dor? Oscar helps cer­tain kids escape, for a price of course, but why do none of them tell any­one what is going on? Why, when she dis­cov­ered what her hus­band was doing, did Oscar’s mother just leave without him?

I wanted far more back story and infor­ma­tion on Oscar’s father. What dri­ves him? Does he feel guilt or remorse? Clearly the power and the con­trol is seduc­tive, but loos­ing a child, though ter­ri­ble, seems too weak a rea­son to cause him to do what he does, and the extremes he takes it to. I wanted to know more about the peo­ple liv­ing in Can­dor — what were their sto­ries? Why did they choose this live? Have they ever fought the Mes­sages? They were just shad­ows in the back­ground and I felt Can­dor would have been a richer novel had we got­ten to know some of these people.

Oscar had the poten­tial to be a very com­plex char­ac­ter — he’s cer­tainly no hero. So why does he never leave? And just how dif­fer­ent is he, in the end, from his father?

Char­ac­ter­i­za­tion is def­i­nitely where Can­dor falls down. The romance between Nia and Oscar just wasn’t believ­able which refutes Oscar’s actions in the book. Overall, Can­dor was a short, but inter­est­ing (if at times uncom­fort­able), read. Def­i­nitely worth check­ing out from the library. The nar­ra­tion is repet­i­tive and a lit­tle too sparse in places, and sadly, Can­dor never takes the time to tackle the really dif­fi­cult ques­tions. But, there were some truly chill­ing moments and the end­ing was pretty near per­fect. Heart­break­ing, sin­is­ter and pow­er­ful. I don’t know if this will become a series — I hope not as I rather like where we ended up.

Rat­ing: 6/10