James Patterson's Witch and Wizard: The Gift

Wisty and Whit Allgood's adventures continue in second book, The Gift. The One Who Is the One relentlessly hunts the two in their journey through the corrupt world that they live in. The are many rules that to be impossible even in the fiction world controlled by the New Order. Things of pleasure that I take for granted are not allowed such as books, music, movies, and even some forms of education. The plan of the New Order is to reform the population to be strictly unified under The One Who Is the One. People live for him and do only what they are instructed. Whit and Wisty are caught up in the madness of this reformation and find themselves under The One's watchful eyes and are captured and taken to the "school" to be processed, decontaminated, and "educated" in the New Order's ways. While at school, their journey becomes even stranger. They are filed in with many other children, even some of their old friends. They are rewarded with chocolates. Wisty is tested here when she oversteps her bodies boundaries and almost O.D.'s on the scrumptious sweets. Whit is entangled with the fight to save his parents while keeping his sister healthy and ready to scramble up the School for the benefit of keeping their Gifts and saving their family. The whole idea of the world that Wisty and Whit live in reminded me of the Chinese government and the rules they have in place about certain TV shows, music, religions, and books that their citizens can be involved with. I wonder what inspired Patterson to create such a world of blockades only different because it reads through the perspective of teenage siblings.