Divergent by Veronica Roth (2010)

“Wait,” I interrupt her. “So you have no idea what my aptitude is?”
“Yes and no. My conclusion,” she explains, “is that you display equal aptitude for Abnegation, Dauntless, and Erudite. People who get this kind of results are…” She looks over her shoulder like she expects someone to appear behind her “…are called…Divergent.” She says the last word so quietly that I almost don’ thear it, and her tense worries look returns (p 22).

Sometime in the future, the people of Chicago are divided into five factions: Abnegation (the selfless), Amity (the peaceful), Candor (the honest), Dauntless (the brave), and Erudite (the intellegent). This factioning is meant to insure peace after devestating wars have left the world bereft.

Like many recent YA distopian novels, this one begins with a ceremony. Beatrice will be tested and then she will select her faction, her future. Will she leave her family in Abnegation and follow her desire, breaking her mother’s heart and disappointing her father, a councilman? Or will she remain and lead a predictable life putting all other lives before her own?

Her test results do no help her. But even more shocking, is the decision her brother makes.

Beatrice does not know much about the other factions and less about the world outside Chicago. What are they hiding from? Why do they need the Dauntless (their army)? Something malicious is brewing and all signs point toward the disgruntled Erudite.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

I went into this novel with high expectations. It was on so many blogger Best Of lists that I felt required to read it. And while it is a smooth read with even pacing and a fiesty main character, the familiar tropes and styreotypical ’bad guy’ failed to engage me.

As Tris embraces her new Dauntless world, I appreciated her zest and common sense. The cruelty displayed by the other initiates and Tris’s survival logic was very Hunger Games-ish. I thought the divergent issue was downplayed (I definitely didn’t see as much strategy as I had hoped) and I was finding the whole world on shakey ground at times. Perhaps the sequel will round out the world building.

This is the third book that qualifies for Roof Beam Reader’s Magical March challenge.

I also recommend:

Top 10 Book Covers of 2011

Confessions of a Bookaholic is hosting a Top 10 of 2011 event. Today, a look back at the top ten book covers of 2011. It is because of their covers (at least in part) that I read these books. Obviously, some these appeal to my feminine sensibilities! Click on the picture to go to my review of the book.

Blood Red Road by Moira Young (2011)

I seen them squiggles before, I says to him. On landfill junk. I spit on the ground. That ain’t nothin special. Bloody Wrecker tech.
Oh no my dear, it’s good Wrecker tech. Noble even! From the very beginnings of time. Those squiggle, as you call them, are letters. Letters joined together make words. And words tell a story. Like this one (p 121).

Sometime in the future, the world has been devastated by the Wreckers and their technology. Along the banks of a dried-up lake, Saba lives with her twin brother, Lugh, her father and her younger sister, Emmi. Since their birth, Saba and Lugh have been inseparable.  

Then some men ride into town on the heels of a dust storm, snatching Lugh away and killing their father. Saba sets out to find Lugh, accompanied by a persistant Emmi. Together, the pair brave the cheats, robbers, and slavers of Hopetown - the nearest settlement – where they learn Lugh was taken by a man who calls himself the King. They are helped by a handsome rogue named Jack and a band of female fighters called the Free Hawks.  Along the way, Saba discovers she is a ferocious fighted herslef and she forms a bond, albeit reluctantly, with her sister and Jack.

The minimalist style of this novel appealed to me immediately. Saba’s dialect (she is illiterate) was also a welcome change. These two factors led to a quick reading of this seemingly long novel. The action starts immediate and rarely slows.

It wasn’t until the later episodes, when I believe the world building was crossing over to improbable, that my adoration wavered. Giant, flesh eating worms with claws? Too Tremors and where the heck did it come from. No other mutant animals until this point. Lugh’s (easy) rescue and the Tonton’s actions? Where was the basis for that? I was left scratching my head. Even the casualties seemed required and unnatural (and the King’s death – ridiculous!).

When Jack rode away, I thought of the poem “My love is like a Red, Red Rose” (read it on WikiSource). Oh, he loves her so much! Then he rides away leaving only promises. Hum. Highly suspect.

Lots of adventure, well-written and it includes the steamy but brief romantic scenes adolescent girls love. I think this will be enjoyed by both boys and girls.

Read other reviews:
Ms. Reader Pants
Hitting on Girls in Bookstores
LA Times

ARC | Margaret K. McElderry Books | June 7, 2011 | ISBN 978-1442429987  | 464 pages | Ages 13 and up | $17.99

Waiting on Wednesday: The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi

Waiting on Wednesday is a weekly book meme hosted by Breaking the Spine. It’s a chance to spotlight an eagerly anticipated title. This week, I’m looking forward to The Drowned Cities by Paolo Bacigalupi. It is a sequel to his Printz Award winning book Ship Breaker. From Amazon:

In this exhilarating companion to Printz Award winner and National Book Award finalist Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi brilliantly captures a dark future America that has devolved into unending civil wars, driven by demagogues who recruit children to become soulless killing machines. Two refugees of these wars, Mahlia and Mouse, are known as “war maggots”: survivors who have barely managed to escape the unspeakable violence plaguing the war-torn lands of the Drowned Cities. But their fragile safety is threatened when they discover a wounded half-man–a bioengineered war beast named Tool, who is hunted by a vengeful band of soldiers. When tragedy strikes, Mahlia is faced with an impossible decision: risk everything to save the boy who once saved her, or flee to her own safety.

Drawing upon the brutal truths of current events, The Drowned Cities is a powerful story of loyalty, survival, and heart-pounding adventure.

 

When She Woke by Hillary Jordan (2011)

She took a seat apart from the other passengers, but even so, the ones nearest her moved away, scooting farther down the bench and, in the case of a mother with a toddler in her arms, getting up and going into the next car. Hannah found herself in a kind of magic circle of ignominy. Her first instinct was to try to make herself invisible, but then a sudden defiance rose in her, and she looked directly into the faces of her fellow passengers, these people who felt so repelled by and morally superior to her. Most avoided her gaze, but a few glared back at her, affronted that she’d dared to rest her eyes on them. She wondered how many of them were liars, their outer purity masking the crimes as dark or darker than her own. How many would be Chromes themselves, if the truth in their hearts were revealed (p 172)?

In Jordan’s dystopian, futuristic retelling of Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter, Hannah Payne is punished for aborting the fetus begot by her lover, the married and well-respected evangelist Aiden Dale. Roe v. Wade has been overturned and abortion is infanticide. The embroidered scarlet letter is replaced by a chemical skin coloring. (Hannah is turned bright red signifying murder. Sexual assault criminals are colored blue while other offenders may be orange or green or yellow.) The shame and societal repercussions are severe.

Hannah, having refused to name the father, bares the brunt of the punishment alone. Prison is simultaneously solitary and non-private, as video of her experience is broadcasted. When released, she is implanted with a tracking device so authorities and the public can find her at any time. She also receives an implant preventing pregnancy. Her sentence is for sixteen years.

Reviews have been mixed for When She Woke and I admit to having mixed feelings about it. I was mostly impressed by the prose. On a few occasions I thought the narrative expounded unnecessarily and overemotionally. This very fault, however, makes it more accessible to emerging adults in my opinion.

Many individual scenes were poignant (Hannah’s exit from the shelter and her encounter with her pregnant sister and her husband, for example), while some of the overarching themes, especially those about religion, were simultaneously over-simplified and unnecessarily complicated. It’s as if the novel was trying to tackle too many things (the justice system, shame, brutality, forgiveness, redemption, church versus state, feminism, personal belief, black market economies, corruption, hypocrisy, and on and on and on) and it could handle only a handful skillfully.  Some of those issues could have been left for the reader to piece together. Instead, the narrative was, at time, heavy-handed.

On a personal note, I was irked when Hannah visited Aiden for one last perfect memory. Sure, she was a different person, but let’s not forget that Aiden was a religious figure, an authority figure who really took advantage of someone much lower on the power scale. And after all she suffered and learned, she felt the need to go to him? Hum.

Regardless, it is an action-packed book that will surely spark discussion with some adoring it and some… well, some of the opposite. The cover is gorgeous.

Read other reviews:
All American Indian Girl
Kirkus Book Review
Washington Post

Hardcover edition provided by the publisher |Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, a division of Workman Publishing | ISBN 978-1565126299 | 341 $24.95

Prized by Caragh M. O’Brien (11/8/11)

Gaia reached to pull Peony near in a hug for what little comfort that could convey. The choice was not simple for Gaia either, nor free from grief, but she had to support Peony in whatever she decided. Never again would she be party to the crime of taking choices away from mothers (p 58).

At the conclusion of Birthmarked (read my review), Gaia was fleeing into the wasteland. Now, on the brink of starvation, she and her little sister, Maya, are picked up by a rugged man named Peter and taken to Sylum, a town surrounding a marsh. For every girl in Sylum there are nine men and the ratio becomes more unbalanced every year. Women, led my a Matrarc, impose harsh social codes that punish uncondoned physical contact between the sexes and pregnant, unwed women.

The Boy at the End of the World by Greg van Eekhout (2011)

Fisher became born in a pod filled with bubbling gel. A plastic umbilical cord snaked from his belly. When he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw through the clear lid of the pod was destruction (p 1).

Fisher wakes from a pod Kyle XY-style in this futuristic dystopia for middle grade readers. Years after humans have destroyed Earth with their experiments, their climate-altering lifestyles, and their excess, Fisher finds a world overgrown with animals, plants and machines evolved. The Ark in which Fisher was grown has been destroyed. He is the only survivor. His only companion is a Robot named Click who activated Fisher’s pod and loaded the fisher’s personality into him.

Then he stumbles upon the reminants of Stragglers. Their writing leads him to a second Ark in the south. Though the journey is fraught with danger, Fisher knows the survival of the human race depends on his finding and possibly awakening other humans.

This is a fast-paced survival adventure with a nice splash of humor (which really works because of the delivery). It never breaks stride and I didn’t loose interest. As Fuse #8 points out, it helps that the book comes in at a concise 212 pages. A good recommend for those who have enjoyed Malice by Wooding or The Maze Runner by Dashner.

Read other reviews: Becky’s Book Review, Book Smugglers, Fuse #8, and Kirkus.

Library copy | June 21, 2011 | Bloomsbury USA Childrens | 224 pages | ISBN:978-1599905242 | $16.99

The Chemical Garden Trilogy: Wither by Lauren DeStefano (2011)

I fall asleep and have horrible dreams of sad girls with exquisite eyes, gray vans erupting with butterflies, windows that won’t open. And everywhere girls, tumbling from trees like orange blossoms and hitting the earth with sickening thuds. They crack open (p 111).

In the future, society is broken into two classes. The First Generations are old but very healthy. They were the first to benefit from genetic engineering – immune to diseases like cancer and other ailments like asthma.

The second class of people are descendants of the First Generations. They are the cursed. Males die at 25. Females at 20. Some of the First Generations experiment on the young trying to find a cure. Others are pro-naturalists, believing humanity is doomed to die out and those who remain should be left to live peacefully.

This has led to an underground market trading in young girls. Sixteen-year-old Rhine is caught by a group of Gatherers and sold to a doctor, Vaughn, bent on finding a cure to the genetic disease that will otherwise claim his son, Linden, who is 21.

Rhine becomes one of Linden’s three wives, desperate to escape the mansion that has become her prison and return to her twin brother in Manhattan, with Gabriel, a house attendant Rhine finds herself increasingly attracted to.

But it won’t be easy with Vaughn constantly watching and with his cold lab in the basement where Rhine can only speculate on what experiments are taking place.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Whither is another dystopia amid an influx of similar works in the wake of The Hunger Games. It’s strength is in its writing, but the setting and some of the story is less stable.

[SPOILERS]

Linden cannot be as ignorant as our narrator would have us believe. That he didn’t notice the other girls were shot when his brides (even in the process of being drugged!) noticed and that he didn’t wonder why the girls were kept like prisoners if they were willing applicants, is absurd. Even if he was ignorant of his own captivity, how could he be so deluded about the rest of the world (of which he has traveled)?

Also, DeStafeno’s version of the future didn’t jive with me either. If the polar ice caps have melted and other countries are undersea, how can Manhattan be above water?

So, all that aside, DeStefano does some good character building. Life inside the Governer’s mansion feels creepy and beautiful. The romance is a little stereotypical but I like that Rhine never seems to completely buy in to either boy.

[END SPOILERS]

Clearly, this is the beginning of a trilogy but this one could also stand on its own and I like that too. And I have to hand it to the book’s designer. Very eye catching and pleasing.

If you enjoyed this, try:

The Maze Runner by James Dashner (2009)

The story begins with Thomas, a young adult, waking up in an elevator, throat sore and dry, mind blank. All he can remember about himself is his name. The elevator opens from above and Thomas hears boys talking… speaking words he doesn’t understand.

He is in the Glade with about 60 other boys who all arrived the same way, via elevator, 30 days apart over the past two years. The boys live together, work together, survive together.

Outside the Glade is the Maze, a labyrinth of sky-high walls wrapped in ivy and inhabited at night by Grievers,  monsterous bio-mechanical creatures that hunt and kill the Gladers.

The Gladers are certain solving the riddle of the Maze, whose walls shift every night while the boys are locked in the Glade, holds the key to their escape. Though food and supplies arrive via the elevator, they long for freedom. But is the world they were taken from worse than the one holding them now? And why were they put in the Glade, memories wiped, in the first place.

Then a girl is sent up via the elevator with a message. Everything is about to change and the boys must escape the Maze.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

There are many elements to this story that will appeal to middle school teens: adventure, action, fights to the death. The plot is complex while remaining easy to read which will appeal to high-low readers.

But I grew impatient with the pacing. Very impatient. I actually began yelling at the reader, who was rather good. Insipid! Intolerable! I’ve never felt so impatient with a book!

After a few days reflection, I calmed and recognized my problem. I dislike when characters seem to be motivated without reason. With (apparently) no memory of his life before waking in the lift, Thomas was often compelled by a feeling to act. Even at the end, he/we don’t know anything really. It was infuriating.

Characters also withheld information unneccesarily, just to spite Thomas or drag the whole story out. Again and again, he was ignored or excluded yet somehow, he becomes the hero. I just didn’t buy it.

But will this have a lot of teen appeal? I imagine it already has a following. Read about a possible movie deal at the LA Times. While I really enjoyed Dashner’s 13th Reality series, this one just wasn’t for me.

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins (2010)

I begin to fully understand the lengths to which people have gone to protect me. What I mean to the rebels. My ongoing struggle against the Capitol, which has so often felt like a solitary journey, has not been undertaken alone. I have had thousands upon thousands of people from the districts at my side. I was their Mockingjay long before I accepted the role (p 90).

Katniss becomes the mockingjay is this final installment in the Hunger Games trilogy.

From the safety of District 13, Katniss comes to terms with the her ‘mixed bag’ past: punishments, manipulation and murders she committed and would have committed to save Peeta.

Gale is with her, as well as her mother and sister, Gale’s family and the other few survivors from District 12. Peeta has been taken by the Capitol but appears to be unharmed when appearing for an interview on Capitol controlled television.

Once Katniss embraces her new role, her message to President Snow is clear. “If we burn, you burn with us” (p 100)!

It soon becomes clear Peeta is not okay. A rescue mission is launched. When Peeta returns, his mind has been hijacked. His memories of Katniss are infused with fear and anger. He attempts to kill her, calling her a mutt, a murderer and a liar.

Katniss begins to dissolve. Finnik, however, transforms when his loved one returns to him. Johanna, another tribute from the Quarter Quell is barely holding on. But together the three train, focusing their attention on killing President Snow. They are chosen for a special squad during the final attack on the Capitol. If Katniss can’t have Peeta, she will have Snow.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

In the first book, The Hunger Games, readers are introduced to the twelve districts and the Capitol. The disparity between those who have and those who have not is stark. That the Districts are kept poor, disconnected and punished regularly, not to mention the horror of the games themselves, implies the President Snow maintains power through intimidation.

Catching Fire reveals the rebel movement, built over many years, taking form and action. Bonds between Peeta and Katniss are made firm. Her resolve to keep him alive at all costs becomes clear. But her situation becomes more complicated as she realizes she has gone from Capitol pawn to Rebel pawn.

In Mockingjay, Katniss must struggle to maintain her hold on reality as the death toll piles high on her conscience. Her worry for Peeta is all-consuming, first when he is in the Capitol’s clutches and then when he is brought, mentally broken, to District 13.

The grand finale is rich with death, strategy, betrayal and sacrifice. But through all this, something was missing. The Hunger Games series is narrated by Katniss, so reader’s never really get a comprehensive view of the political workings of this world. I felt this more acutely in Mockingjay than in any of the previous books.

Because Katniss is viewed as a symbol rather than a competent soldier and strategist and because she is so mentally damaged by the horrors she has committed or viewed (and drugged constantly and, often, willingly), she is not privy to the inner workings of District 13. She is left guessing… about everything. She must do damage control rather than prevention. She is reactionary rather than revolutionary. In her defense, she was suffering under major trauma, without pause.

When Katniss kills President Coin, I was left wondering if it was the best solution. And who is Paylor? Some of the minor characters never gained any dimension so the future of Panem seems like a plot throw-away. Did the republic become a reality? Did the outcome even matter? Perhaps it was the loss of self suffered for the pursuit of ideology that Collins wants to drag into the light. What has become of Gale?

Whereas figures like Big Brother (1984) or societies like the World State (A Brave New World) are illusionary or too large to overcome or both, Panem appears infantile by comparison. Snow, for all his cleverness, fails spectacularly. The brutal forces unleashed on those attempting to take the Capitol seemed impenetrable. I had trouble reconciling a Rebel victory through force rather than… say… isolating the Capitol and starving them into surrender. Or a well-organized infiltration of the Capitol… seems the system was flimsy enough. Replace a few key players and – bam - new government. Snow’s regime lacked the deep-rooted immovable governments of other classic dystopian novels, yet its violence and ruthlessness was on par. I just can’t reconcile this disparity in my head.

I was pleased to learn more about Finnik, one of the victors allied with the Rebels, and sorrowful at his death. The mild-toned relationship the emerges between Katniss and Peeta in the epilogue was pitch perfect, however. While some readers may be disappointed that Katniss settles for Peeta, how could a girl starved from childhood, traumatized and physically as well as mentally beaten ever love as we would have her love? Peeta is no less broken than she. This is more of a realistic finale than a hopeful one, but did you read the previous books? In my opinion, their survival and relative freedom at the conclusion is more than I expected.

Read other reviews: LA Times, Persnickety Snark, and A Chair, a Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy