Incarceron by Catherine Fisher

This is a futuristic sci-fi thriller.  I will be honest, I didn't think I would last through it and I was frequently looking at the page number on my nook to see when it would end.  It was VERY hard to get into because the author throws you into the story without any pretext of what in the sam hill is going on.  So for about the first half of the book it's very confusing.  VERY.  After midway through though things were slowly explained a little bit and it started picking up and becoming more adventurous and thrilling.  There's also a lot of plotting and "game playing" as Claudia calls it.  I'll try to give a short summary without giving away too much.  The book takes place in the future after there was a big war.  Incarceron was made to be a "paradise experiment" of sorts.  Now time and space and all that physics stuff will play into this book big time.  On the outside of Incarceron there is now a monarchy and the court has decided that the world needs to go back in time so everything is more simple.  "Protocol" says that things should be specifically to a certain era back in time where servants wore powdered wigs and breeches, women wore extravagant dresses and technology was illegal.  But of course not everyone follows protocol.  Claudia lives in a turn of the century mansion filled with servants and has her own tutor, a Sapient as they're called, but yet there's a washer and dryer in the servants' quarters.  Claudia has never really known what her Dad actually does as Warden.  But the story starts to unfold as She and Jared, her Sapient tutor, discover some clues as to what Incarceron really is.  But what Claudia doesn't know is that Incarceron is nothing like a paradise but a prison.  Where food is scarce, it is survival of the fittest and nothing is happy.  The sunlight is not real, the animals are not completely real and it is the hardest life imaginable.  Finn, who does not remember anything beyond a certain time is focused on finding out who he really is.  Every now and then he gets "visions" that he begins to think are memories.  Once Claudia and Finn realize what is really going on, the journey just begins.....
After the story got better in the end, I'd want to read the second one (Saphique), but it's not on the top of my list right now....happy reading!