In this dystopian novel, teenaged Natalina “Nat” Peña lives in a future San Francisco, where she works as a hotel maid, practices martial arts, and cares for her eleven-year-old brother, Calvino. “Cal” should be starting to ‘wane’, where kids in their teens begin to lose their ability to feel emotions. Nat has already waned. Their mother is dead, having died from taking bad “emotion” drugs while trying to regain her own lost emotions. And their dad is estranged and missing. When a corporation kidnaps Cal to do medical research on him to determine why he isn’t waning, Nat feels a series of emotions and this shocks her. Why is she feeling? An interesting premise for a dystopian novel.

What she does next takes up the bulk of the book. And this is where the premise failed for me. There was too much violence, too many unexplained secret weapons, too many unrealistic situations. I just could not buy it. Some die-hard fans of dystopia who are looking for a new book may enjoy it, but The Waning Age is not for me.