I loved this book, it was different and fresh and I didn’t know what was coming next. It reminded me of a Black Mirror episode - something that is partly futuristic and out there, but could also totally happen in the near future. Definitely going to recommend to my friends and fellow readers!

This book is an absolute standout! The concept immediately grabbed my attention—it felt like it could be a dark mix of The Hunger Games and Love Island, but it turned out to be so much more. The story dives deep into the human psyche, exploring themes of reality versus performance, materialism, and holistic survival. While I’ve read many "stranded on an island" stories, this one stood out as incredibly original and fresh, offering a twisted take on one of my favorite reality shows. The narrative is gripping and compelling, balancing thriller and suspense elements with sharp satire. A fascinating and thought-provoking read!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the Kindle ARC in exchange for an honest review. Set in a compound in the desert a reality show about gaining prizes, whether they be basics or luxuries, Lily is a young woman contestant with several other young people both women and men. The story is mix of a reality show but with cruel outcomes for some of the contestants. There is the usual backstabbing and some teamwork. This might be a perfect book for someone younger than I am but I started to lose patience about halfway through.

“The Compound” by Aisling Rawle is an interesting social commentary on reality TV shows. It is a dystopian take on the program “Big Brother” and equally addictive. We are taken into the villa with 19 sexy and beautiful contestants and watch them complete tasks for both essential and fabulous prizes. Similar to the program, the challenges and tasks get more difficult and dangerous. As with the program the suspense of what will happen to these contestants kept me turning the pages. I kept expecting a shoe to drop and sinister forces to show up. This was alluded to throughout the novel but it never came to fruition. For me, what was happening behind the scenes and the backdrop of a dystopian war was much more interesting than the shallowness of the characters. This would normally be a 3.5 for me but I’m rounding it up to a 4 because I couldn’t put the book down it was very entertaining.

Thank you NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Random House for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

What a surprising book! This book is pitched as Lord of the Flies meets Love Island, and I can definitely see the comparisons. The book takes place in a speculative future with a Love Island style esque reality show that unfolds over the course of the novel. You are just dropped in at the beginning, and a creeping sense of dread pervades throughout the whole novel because you realize that something has happened to the world it’s set in. I loved seeing what happened and the commentary and how realistic and flawed the main character was.

Some “If you liked” style comparisons: Love Island (obviously), the Hunger Games, and One Perfect Couple by Ruth Ware

Warning: The is VERY slow and laborious at times and I wouldn’t say it’s particularly satisfying at the end. I think it goes with the author’s intent though, and it could lead to interesting discussion if you dissect it with a buddy read. You need to be ok with ambiguity.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the advanced reader copy.

Aisling Rawle’s “The Compound” focus is reality TV following 20 contestants who face challenges and cruelty beyond belief to earn rewards and a potentially better life in a world apparently at war. The writing is quite good and the characterizations fascinating. I kept expecting more though. More about why contestants would choose this show - just how bad was life outside the compound? I also expected the outside world to infringe on the compound. It never did except for a fire the producers started as a punishment. It was a fast fun read, but I kept craving something. I just wish I knew what it was.

I found this book to be incredibly compelling and interesting - I read the whole thing in one sitting. I'm a fan of The Bachelor and reality TV shows like that, so I knew this book was going to be right up my alley from the moment it started. I found it to be an interesting social commentary on reality TV shows and also what people would do for love and/or fame and/or basic necessities.

The main character I found to be a little empty and shallow, which I didn't really like at first, but I grew to realize that this was just an important part of her character traits and explained some of her actions.

My main criticism of this book was that I felt like the dystopian aspect of this book wasn't really explored enough - they kept referencing the war and there was definitely some hints as to this not happening in the world as we know it, but it was so far off in the distance. I kept thinking they were going to get into it, but they didn't really.

Overall, I really liked this book and recommend to anyone who likes watching reality TV with a little too much of a critical eye.

The Compound by Aisling Rawle is a captivating book. I devoured it within the span of a few days.

This book is based on a reality tv show where contestants are in a remote desert and must be coupled by the dawn in order to continue living in the seemingly paradise compound. They are given group and personal challenges that will result in necessities or luxuries for themselves.

I found this book to be easily digestible, and full of comparisons on modern-day society. What are we valuing? Consumerism at the expense of all else? Community vs individualism, etc. most if not all of these themes were more subtext and just thoughts that crossed my mind while I was reading the book. That’s really the only thing I wish was explored further and more explicitly within the book. As it stands the book is more surface-level; which is what I think makes it easily digestible.

In the beginning, I found it a bit difficult to keep track of the different contestants, once they started to leave the Compound I was able to keep track more clearly.

The plot kept me interested throughout the whole book. I was curious to see what would happen and even when I put the book down, I was still thinking about it. Similar to a reality tv show, I had thoughts about what choices certain characters would make and then later would be surprised by their actions. It wasn’t predictable (which as a reader I appreciate).

There was an underlying sense of foreboding and an almost sinister feeling through portions of it. I felt intensely enthralled and on the edge of my seat with anticipation. I honestly expected a death to occur at some point.

I think the length of the book was good. It wasn’t overly long nor was it so short where I craved more.
I’d recommend this book if you are interested in the premise of a dystopian reality show. You’ll love it if you are someone who is ok with the unknown, you are able to question and interrogate the actions of characters, and you tend to compare books to real life. The beauty of this book is how it can make you think about life, culture, and values.

Personally, I greatly enjoyed this book and would give it 4 stars. Big thank you to Aisling Rawle, Random House Publishing, and NetGalley for providing me with the ARC for review.

This book was SO good and I read it all in one day! I have read a lot of fiction books set in reality TV, but this one felt truly unique & addicting. I couldn’t put it down because I had to see what would happen to Lily and everyone else! I normally don’t like ambiguous endings, but I feel like the loose ends made perfect sense for this sorry. Again, this book was so unique and I know I’ll be thinking about it for a very long time.

Lily, a beautiful twenty-something, wakes up at a remote desert compound along with 19 other contestants. 10 women and 9 men must compete to stay in the compound the longest all while competing in group and personal tasks. Each time a task is complete, contestants receive rewards ranging from essential everyday items to luxury designer goods. As the days and weeks go on, and the number of contestant dwindle, Lily and the others are challenged even more by the unseen producers. Fighting urges of romance, fierce competition, consumerism, and more, how will the contestants fare as their numbers diminish? Who will be the last one standing and receive prizes beyond their imagination.

The Hunger Games meets Bachelor in Paradise, “The Compound” is an excellent novel for readers who love a great closed door setting with a fun concept. The action begins almost immediately and leaves readers always guessing what will happen next. The story manages to pull on your heartstrings and get your adrenaline pumping at the same time. The only downside is a bit of an anticlimactic ending. Otherwise 4/5 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC of The Compound.

This book had me hooked from the very first page. I devoured it in two sittings. The Compound is a fast-paced read that fans of Big Brother, Survivor, and Love Island will love. It perfectly captures the dangerous, high-stakes energy of reality TV, blending it with sharp social commentary.

One of the book’s standout strengths was its exploration of consumerism. Aisling Rawle cleverly weaves this theme throughout the narrative. The story also touches on gender roles, which added another layer of complexity, though I would have loved for the book to dig a bit deeper into that particular theme.

Overall, The Compound is an exciting, addictive read that I highly recommend. It’s one you’ll want to add to your TBR list, especially if you’re looking for something that’s both entertaining and thought-provoking.

I used to watch Big Brother for many years and loved it. This totally had Big Brother vibes but with some extra unique twists. I enjoyed reading about most of the characters even though some of them were just so easy to hate! This was addicting, bingeable, and had a nice little life lesson at the end to wrap it all up. My only complaint was the major gender stereotyping that occurred: the girls cleaned and cooked while the boys lifted weights and built things. I could have done without that. 4.5 stars rounded down!

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for an ARC of this novel.

This book is fantastic, I think it was insanely interesting and I was sucked into it immediately. I read this in a day, I truly could not put it down. I don't want to ruin any plot of this book but I really think this is one of the most interesting books I've read.

While a fairly fun read, "The Compound" plays things far too safe for what it promises: a Love Island mashup with Lord of the Flies. For me, the appeal of any social-experiment reality dating show is the psychological manipulation and gamesmanship built into the format – the bedswapping, the betrayals, the catty backstabbing, the actual diplomatic skills required to get to the end of the show – all forced upon participants by unseen producers. "The Compound" overlays this with a hinted-at dystopian, apocalyptic future outside the boundaries of the show, which feels like a thrilling, natural commentary on where we're headed as a society, but the execution here is ultimately underdeveloped.

Protagonist Lily is an extremely passive, shallow, effortlessly beautiful participant. Her fellow male and female contestants are mostly interchangeable and indistinct. None of the characters seem particularly good at the underlying "game" of the show they're participating in, nor do the producers interject the kind of chaos-inducing drama that the author or book description promises.

Lily has men throwing themselves at her the entire time (to an incredulous degree), she's never in real danger of being ejected from the compound (duh, she's the protagonist), and while there's a show rule about not revealing personal information, she displays a complete lack of curiosity about any of the other people around her. Lily's main antagonist, whom I will not name here, is predatory, dangerous, abusive, and comes in the stereotypical physical package of every woman's fear, but we don't get enough context for why he acts as he does, even after the personal info rule is dropped in the final portion, and it bothered me that Lily was so incurious and self-involved all the time.

Ultimately, the premise of this book drew me in and I commend the author's debut effort, but I was really looking for her to go a lot deeper into the psychology of Love Island participants – or take a Hunger Games approach with the greater world/audience watching – so I'm bummed by the author's aversion to fleshing out her characters backstories and lives outside of the compound, and it made all the proceedings very surface-level and thin.

It took me about 10%-15% of the way to really get into this. At first I was a little thrown off by the writing, which could have been edited more and the conversations seemed unnatural. But once I got into it, the plot took a hold on me. Like Love Island mixed with Lord of the Flies, this ended being pretty intense with all the relationships, drama, and unknowns of how people would act or what they would do next. I found the ending a bit meh, more could have been done with it, not just plot wise, but subtle comparisons of everyday life and what we would do for material things to really seal the book with more of a bang.

I really loved this novel. It reminded me of Bright Young Things by Scarlett Thomas, which is a book that reminds me of the song “Pets” by Porno For Pyros.

Also, the ending was very sweet and not as terrifying as you might think from the oil painting on the cover. Because a book with an oil painting like that on the cover seems to always have that septic speculative wormhole of an ending. And those kinds of endings make me either forget the book entirely or hate everything that came before. This book satisfies and satiates. Which means I’ll actually remember it fondly.

Five stars.

A compelling premise from Rawle, and enough mystery to get me to keep reading. Some of the characters were difficult to distinguish from others in the first 60%-ish, but that could be a function of the satire...not everyone fits into predetermined reality television stereotypes easily enough for the machine to function. Enjoyable read, liked but did not love. Two and a half stars.

Aisling Rawle's The Compound is utterly and totally bingeable—a page-turner from the very beginning to the (anti-climactic) end. When I wasn't reading it, I was thinking about it. It's exactly what it describes itself as: a dystopian take on the reality shows you love. Rawle has taken your favorite shows, like The Bachelor or Love Island, and set them in a not-so-distant future, starring a cast of (mostly) unique, enjoyable characters.

We follow Lily, who wakes up in the compound—this novel's take on your favorite show's "villa"—surrounded by sexy singles with a wall of tasks to complete to win fabulous prizes, or in some cases, food. The challenges get more difficult as time passes, turning up the heat and thrill through the book's 300 pages. Like the shows this book is based on, you can't help but read on to see what happens next and who gets banished to the outside world. The author handles themes of relationships, love, consumerism, and more quite nicely.

But what makes this book so good—the suspense of what may happen next to these people—is also what hinders it from reaching the highs of stardom (similar to what Lily is after). I struggled to keep the characters apart from one another at first, but that becomes easier as we say goodbye to them at a clip. The author also approaches serious themes like biphobia and misogyny but doesn't say anything new about them. The former is handled interestingly, but we move on so quickly that it feels like it's happening in a vacuum.

Lastly, and this one is on me, but the entire time I was reading, I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop. It feels like sinister forces are at play at the compound, but nope, it's just a reality show set in a dystopian world. Speaking of this world, interestingly, the novel was once compared to Leave The World Behind on Goodreads. That comparison seems to be missing in the recent description of the book, but if you check out the author's profile, she has another version of this book with it. It's a shame since it reminded me of that book and what I loved/disliked about it. Like Leave The World Behind, some of the characters are interesting and there's a sense of dread, but ultimately what is happening behind the scenes and off the pages is more interesting. In the case of The Compound, Rawle has created a world that we only hear about in muted conversations that I thought we'd eventually face head-on with Lily, but that doesn't happen. Their world is at war. With what, we don't know.

Ultimately, the journey is much more interesting than the destination. But, like many of the reality shows you and I watch, isn't that the case? Especially when the couple we're rooting for doesn't make it to the end, or even worse, breaks up after the show airs? Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for the ARC.

Well written and exciting. A new kind of thriller novel that I think will really resonate with readers. I couldn't put it down.

I would have loved to have gotten more characterization early on, but I understand that was the nature of the story. Can't wait to read more by Aisling Rawle!

In the coming days, I'll share a review on instagram @stressiereads. https://www.instagram.com/stressiereads/

Thank you for the copy.

My Goodreads review:
Wow. This one flowed like a Black Mirror episode. I stayed up late into the night reading because it was so addictive.

The book is darker than the description would suggest. It's also deeper than I was expecting. While the novel is dystopian, it brings up real and serious questions about what we are doing with our lives and the things that we value as a society right now.

Thanks for the ARC. I enjoyed reading this so much.

4.5⭐️ I was dropped into a Love island thriller season reading this! Immersive, fun, & highly addictive. I couldn’t stop reading & finished it in one night, completely on edge and dying to know what would happen next. The main character’s point of view has this wry, unsettling undertone that immediately makes you question reality, and the story only becomes more unhinged as it progresses. I enjoyed the pacing and found it propulsive. However, I wish it had gone even more off the deep end. It did play it a bit safe. That said, character motivations and backstories also remained largely unexplored, and there are no real answers about how or why the world operates. Still, the lack of clarity wasn’t that important to my entertainment. If you like reality shows like love island, this is a fun & unique spin on the locked room thriller.