Breakaway Books

Authored by Katharine McGee; Published 2016; Science Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

The Thousandth Floor may take place over a century in the future, but the teen drama looks exactly the same as it does today. You can wrap it in flashy, convenience-creating technology, but entitled teenagers are still entitled teenagers. 

In The Thousandth Floor, genetically-engineered-for-perfection Avery lives in the penthouse of the gigantic tower that houses most of the population of New York City. She and her upper class friends have at their disposal everything they could possibly need in the cushy top third of the tower. When Avery’s adoptive brother and secret crush Atlas reappears after a mysterious year away, the carefully crafted ecosystem of Avery’s friend group falls into disarray. Leda, Avery’s best friend, desperately tries to reclaim Atlas’s affection; Eris is thrown out of her home and forced to move down-tower; even playboy Cord finds himself falling in love with his maid. But what seems like petty teenage grudges ends in death.

There’s nothing really ground-breaking about this novel. At its core, it is all about teenage secrets and crushes, and their consequences playing out across a particularly rich and entitled friend group. Despite the futuristic setting, the advanced technology has not changed anything fundamental about the teenagers’ way of life. Instead, it has exaggerated what is already there, making class differences as clear as day, defining your worth by the floor of the tower on which you live. Convenience has been taken to an extreme that even Doordash and Postmates can’t hope to match. There’s an argument to be made that technology rarely changes life in a fundamental way, but I do enjoy science fiction that truly takes risking by depicting a different world.

I’m not sure how I feel about it as a novel for teens–to me, it didn’t feel like there was much substance to it at all. Will it entertain your teen? Maybe. They probably won’t come away with any lasting lessons, except, perhaps, just how much an addiction to drugs can ruin your life. I found the upper-class teenage girls to be particularly obnoxious, but I might be a little out-of-touch with how kids actually are nowadays anyway. (Not to sound too much like a crotchety old person…) The best that can be said of the novel is that the climax is well-orchestrated and tense, a moment that the author spends the whole novel building toward. I couldn’t help but think that I wasn’t sure that the one good moment was worth the entire lead up.

If you’re into teen drama as an avenue for escape, The Thousandth Floor very much could do it for you. If not, this one isn’t worth your time.