Becca Wilkinson is just another quiet and "invisible" 17-year-old girl. She's smart, she does well in school, but she doesn't want to be noticed. She does everything to avoid standing out in the crowd. Even though she could easily get straight A's in every subject, she maintains a "safe" 3.0 average, to avoid drawing too much attention to herself. Together with her best friend, Patrice, they're doing their best to get through their days at Leeville High.

Ever since the horrible car crash, she caused exactly one year ago, Becca has been a loner and an outcast. She doesn't remember much about what happened during the accident, only bits and pieces of memories, but it's enough to make her life miserable. Unable to deal with the guilt, Becca is haunted by nightmares and suffers severe panic attacks. As if this wasn't enough, weird things are happening to her. She is starting to hear people's thoughts. She also discovers that when she's under stress, she has the ability to influence people and make them act in a certain way, to control them. And things just keep on getting weirder. She learns that her panic attacks are not really panic attacks at all, and that the pills she was taking are not exactly antidepressants either. One shocking discovery leads to another, and so Rebecca's whole world, everything she believed in, falls apart. She's going to have to face the truth about herself, who she is and where she's from, and she will be forced to make some tough choices.

Wasteland by Patricia Williams is definitely one of my top favorite debut novels of 2011. The storyline is fantastically unique and fresh. It's a fast-paced read, the plot develops very quickly and there is this really awesome tension to it, that makes you squeeze the eReader tightly in anticipation of what will happen next. It's unpredictable, I was very surprised to find out who Becca really was and what she could do. There's a great deal of uncertainty here, the story is so brilliantly constructed that the reader is never really able to predict anything. In the first book we have many burning questions and only a few answers. I enjoyed the twists very much, this novel keeps you captivated and it's just impossible to put it down. It's one of the best page turners I've ever read.

Becca went through many hardships, yet she's not a winy or overly melodramatic character. Quite to the contrary, she has a strong and likeable personality, she never backs down, she stands up for herself and tries to do, what she thinks is right. Same goes for the rest of the characters, each and every single one of them is very vivid and real, it's easy to imagine them and either like them, or hate them. The story is being told in first person narrative and it definitely works to its advantage, making it very dynamic.

I loved Patricia's writing style, she is no doubt a very promising and talented author and I can't wait to read the next installments in The Kin series. If you like Young Adult dystopian and/or fantasy novels, you just have to add this book to your collection, it's a must read! ( )