’Sword of the Seven Sins’ by Emily Colin should appeal to fans of ’The Hunger Games’ and ’Ready Player One’

“The first time I condemned a man to death, I was 10 years old.”

Wilmington author Emily Colin passes the test on Creative Writing 101, the one with the lesson, “Grab your readers’ attention with your first sentence.”

Colin — who’s written romantic novels with supernatural overtones, such as “The Memory Thief” and “The Dream Keeper’s Daughter” — switches over to young adult dystopias with her latest, “Sword of the Seven Sins.”

The time: Some indefinite future, after an environmental catastrophe.

The place: The Commonwealth, a very gated community of some 10,000 souls. Nobody knows what’s outside the Commonwealth’s thick metal gates, since nobody has been there. A number of other Commonwealths far, far away, with only wreckage and unspeakable horrors in between.

Like Margaret Atwood’s Gilead, the Commonwealth is a theocracy where the citizens are color-coded. Priests wear red while the Bellators — the peacekeeping force who are part ninja, part Gestapo — dress in black.

The religion might hark back to Roman Catholicism since the priests love Latin. (“Bellator,” by the way, is Latin for warrior or fighter.) There are also bits of Freemasonry. The supreme being is called “The Architect.”

Commonwealth citizens all know the Seven Deadly Sins, but not forgiveness or redemption. Infractions are punished by starving, by flogging, by sewing eyelids shut (not permanently) and, in extreme cases, by beheading.

Lust, one of the Seven Deadlies, is banned, along with romantic love. Babies are born by artificial insemination, reared in a communal Nursery. At age 17, at The Choosing, young people are assigned their jobs for life.

Which brings us to Eva, the 10-year-old executioner. Eva watches her tongue, but deep down, she’s rebelling against The Commonwealth’s gross injustices.

Which leads to a shock: At The Choosing, the big boss, the Executor, assigns her as an apprentice to the Bellators — the first woman warrior the Commonwealth has seen in, like, forever. Why such an ingrained, conservative society would make such a move isn’t clear.

Eva is clear that she hates it. She wanted to work with computers. (In some ways, the Commonwealth is fairly advanced. It gets its power from highly developed wind turbines, and its labs are splicing genes.) She thinks the Bellators are arrogant, sadistic bullies. Still, she has no choice.

And surprisingly, she turns out to be an outstanding recruit. Nimble with sharp reflexes, she’s a natural at martial arts and blade work. Soon, she’s besting even veteran warriors. (All that pent-up anger certainly helps.)

Even her trainer, Ari, is impressed, though he won’t admit it. Eva thinks Ari is stuck up. Ari thinks Eva is ill-tempered and rebellious. Secretly, both are drawn to each other. Any devoted readers of young adult romance can guess what happens next.

As expected, the star-crossed lovers discover that there’s a resistance movement to the Commonwealth — and that there’s a way out of its heavy metal gates, past the forest stuffed with giant, bloodthirsty, mutated predators. But it won’t be easy.

Much of the fun here is watching Colin build her world. Clearly an avid reader, she’s obviously borrowing snippets from other classics — from “Brave New World,” from Arthur C. Clarke’s “The City and the Stars,” from M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Village” and many more — to weave her own unique quilt.

One wishes that Colin had been a bit more divergent, that she’d been more willing to play with the cliches of the Teen Dystopia genre and try something new and different. As it is, however, “Sword of the Seven Sins” offers solid if predictable entertainment.

The chapters — alternately narrated by Eva and Ari — move swiftly, and Colin supplies enough action to keep readers who were raised on video games entertained. The book should prove a hit with fans of “The Hunger Games” or “Ready Player One,” and at least one sequel is reportedly in the works.

Ben Steelman can be reached at 910-616-1788 or peacebsteelman@gmail.com.