Part social experiment, part medical mystery, this historical fiction novel has many twists and turns on every page.

If there was ever a novel that I could describe as morbidly fascinating, Do You Want To Live? would be it. Though it was a hard read because of the subject material, it was also frighteningly easy to turn the next page to see what the Doctor had in store for the subjects of Camp Paradise to experience. And to find the next piece of the puzzle that the main character, Mia Engle is desperate to solve.

Written in 1st person from Mia’s point of view, we inhabit the mind of a person trapped between two roles of prisoner and staff. In a similar fashion, the protagonist’s thoughts often swing between indifferent toward things happening to her or desperate to protect herself and those around her. Which can be quite a bit to deal with at 19, especially against the backdrop of the latter years of World War II.

However, this particular point of view is one of the few things I found personally problematic with the novel. Mia serves as both protagonist and narrator, a very unreliable one on the latter. And for the sake of the central mystery plot running through, I understand it. But she was also unreliable in ways that didn’t serve a purpose for story, interacting with people or the setting in ways that felt incongruous between scenes or even parts of the same scene. While it could have been intentional, the swings felt a bit too wide. Attachments Mia made happened so fast, that I as a reader didn’t feel attached as well. My only other real issue was pacing. The beginning and setup are spectacular, but the latter parts feel very rushed in comparison.

I found the strongest areas of the novel to be the gatherings the Doctor holds, where subjects are called onto a platform to run through challenges and always asked the question from the title. The emotion that these and a few either scenes can evoke make the novel worth reading alone. I don’t recommend readers sensitive to violence, emotional trauma, or mental trauma to pick this one up. If you are fan of mysteries or medical horrors, I highly suggest reading Do You Want To Live? Especially if you enjoyed the early movies of the Saw franchise.

Do You Want To Live? by C. B. Collins is available to buy on Amazon or you can visit the author’s website to find out more about this and their other works.

Verdict:

READABLE