Book Review: The Dazzling Heights

Author: Katharine McGee

Publication Date: August 29, 2017

Publisher: HarperCollins

Series: The Thousandth Floor #2

All that glitters is not gold.

New York City, 2118. Manhattan is home to a thousand-story supertower, a breathtaking marvel that touches the sky. But amid high-tech luxury and futuristic glamour, five teenagers are keeping dangerous secrets…

Leda is haunted by memories of what happened on the worst night of her life. She’ll do anything to make sure the truth stays hidden—even if it means trusting her enemy.

Watt just wants to put everything behind him…until Leda forces him to start hacking again. Will he do what it takes to be free of her for good?

When Rylin wins a scholarship to an upper-floor school, her life transforms overnight. But being there also means seeing the boy whose heart she broke, and who broke hers in return.

Avery is tormented by her love for the one person in the world she can never have. She’s desperate to be with him…no matter the cost.

And then there’s Calliope, the mysterious, bohemian beauty who arrives in New York determined to cause a stir. And she knows exactly where to begin.

But unbeknownst to them all, someone is watching their every move, someone with revenge in mind. After all, in a world of such dazzling heights, just one wrong step can mean a devastating fall.

“Even if nothing happens between you and Atlas, you aren’t really going to let that girl get away with trying to seduce him and steal from him, are you?”

I can’t take anyone for granted every again, she promised herself, except that she was already losing the people she cared about.

It made her feel surprisingly vindicated, proving that the only boy who’d ever rejected her wanted her after all. Finally. It was about damn time.

He needed a drink if he was going to keep getting further tangled in the Gordian knot of these highliers’ screwed-up lives. 

Like most second books in a series, this one let me down in more ways than one. We start with the usual cast of characters: Watt, Leda, Rylin, Avery, and Mariel. However, we have a new face on the scene, Miss Calliope Brown, who brings with her mystery, a little bit of drama, and intrigue. The drama in this book is at an all-time high, but this book lacked the intensity that the first one carried all the way through. I liked that a new character was brought onto the scene and let me say that she is worth the hype. I loved the fleshing out of Calliope’s character and the drama that she added in the lives of our friends. On the other hand, I disliked the relationship progression between Avery and Atlas. In fact, Atlas annoyed and frustrated me. He seemed a bit whiny and I grew to dislike him very quickly.

My biggest issues with this book was that it was predictable; I saw the end coming a mile away. McGee did not seem to add any more depth to any of these main characters. The angst that I felt in the first book between many of the characters was just not there this time around. The first book had a crazy, ridiculous ending that was totally unexpected, for me at least, and left me DYING to read the next book. The ending of this book was a bit of a letdown. Please don’t think that I hated the entire book because that is not so. Like I said, I loved Calliope’s character and I LOVED that McGee decided to incorporate another big city like New York City with a thousand floor tower. A short period of the book is spent in Dubai and I thought it was nice to see a short snippet of life in another city.