Review: Resistance

Title: Resistance

Series: Divided Elements #1

Author: Mikhaeyla Kopievsky

Genre: Dystopian

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, needles/injections (severe), medical content, domestic violence (mentions), sexual content (mentions), injury, animal death (mentions), alcohol use (a lot), self-harm (brief)

Back Cover:

From the moment you are born, you are conditioned to know this truth: Unorthodoxy is wrong action, Heterodoxy is wrong thought. One will lead to your Detention. The other to your Execution.

Once known as Paris, the walled city-state of Otpor is enjoying a new Golden Age.

The horrors of the Singularity and Emancipation forgotten, citizens now revel in a veritable utopia of ubiquitous drugs, alcohol, and entertainment, washed down with full employment, universal healthcare, and affordable housing. All made possible by the Orthodoxy – a new world order where everything is engineered to maximum efficiency, including identities.

From an early age, citizens are aligned and conditioned to one of four neuro-social classes named after the cardinal elements of old: single-minded Fire to enforce, creative Air to entertain, technical Water to engineer, and base Earth to labour.

All four Elements exist in complete equality, fraternity, and liberty. But, not everyone is satisfied with the status quo.

Two generations after the Execution of Kane 148 and Otpor’s return to Orthodoxy, the Resistor’s legacy still lingers. Forbidden murals are appearing on crumbling concrete walls to threaten the city’s structured harmony – calling citizens to action. Calling for Resistance.

When Kane’s former protégé, Anaiya 234, is selected for a high-risk mission, Otpor is given the chance it needs to eliminate the Heterodoxy and Anaiya the opportunity she craves to erase a shameful past. But the mission demands an impossible sacrifice – her identity.

Subjected to a radical new procedure, Anaiya’s identity is realigned, allowing her to go deep undercover in search of the growing rebellion. But as the risk of violence escalates and every decision is fraught with betrayal, Anaiya’s fractured identity threatens to unravel not only her mission, but her mind.

Review:

I have read a lot of YA dystopian. This is largely because it was the primary YA genre during my prime YA reading years. If I’d read it back then, or even when it first released in 2017, I probably would have considered it a fine but not particularly noteworthy example of the genre. (Although it isn’t technically YA, it has a very YA feel, and I probably would have categorized it as such.) However, reading it in 2023 – with expanded adult reading tastes, an extra decade of reading and reviewing (and life) experience, and a much deeper understanding of books in general – makes it an absolutely wild experience.

There are some really great ideas and unique takes on dystopian tropes in this story. As much as I generally dislike the post-Hunger Games trend of dystopias sorting society into groups, this world’s idea of testing children’s aptitudes and then using neural conditioning/scifi tech to fully align their brains to particular elemental traits, making their elemental alignment basically hard-wired into their brains, was a unique take. I enjoyed the reconditioning element, where Anaiya got to experience emotions for the first time and all the complexities that emotions come with, especially when you’re not used to dealing with them. I found it both fascinating and relatable, and if the story dropped most of the attempted-dystopian elements and put the focus on Anaiya’s internal journey, I think I would have enjoyed it a lot more. The “are we the baddies?” idea is also a unique take on dystopian stories – instead of rising up from the oppressed under-class, the protagonist starts out as an agent of the dystopian government and slowly realizes that maybe the government isn’t as good as she thought.

However, despite the actually good ideas Resistance has, it has three major flaws that undermine it both as a dystopian story and as a reading experience.

First, it doesn’t convince me that this is a dystopian world. Characters talk about how terrible everything is, but not only do we not see that in the narrative, they don’t even give examples. The only actual described problem is police brutality (or, in this case, Fire element brutality) – it’s the only thing actually shown on-page and the only specific issue anyone complains about. Dystopian societies probably have police brutality, sure, but it’s not exclusive to dystopias. There is a curfew and the whole idea of conditioning people to elements in the first place, but these definitely more dystopian happenings are mentioned in passing as world-building. Nobody seems to actually have a problem with those.

Second, which ties into both the previous and next points, it never shows anyone in power in this society. The closest the story ever gets to someone “in charge” is the Fire element commander who gives Anaiya her initial re-alignment assignment. A dystopian society just doesn’t feel very dystopian without someone or a small group of someones at the top doing the oppressing, and this book never indicates that there’s anyone actually in power at all. It may be realistic that ordinary people don’t actually interact with those in power, but they should at least know who their king/”president”/commander/dictator/etc. is. Not only does it reduce the world’s dystopia factor, lacking an antagonist, even a symbolic one, makes fighting the system feel unrealistic.

Which brings me to the third problem: it fails to convince me that the resistance is a threat, or even that it exists in a meaningful way. Everyone is getting bent out of shape about the “Heterodoxy” and the brewing rebellion and how terrible this is going to be. But for the vast majority of the book, the entire rebellion consists of murals that say “Resistance.” That’s it. It does escalate a little towards the end, but not by much. The entire alleged rebellion against the entire alleged dystopia for most of the book is unauthorized paintings with provocative words. And, minor spoiler time, Anaiya’s infiltration finds there’s only three to five people behind the whole thing. The response to the threat of this Heterodoxy seems wildly out of proportion with the scope of the damage that five people doing unauthorized art can actually do.

I think I found this book so disappointing because there are some really good ideas. It does some truly fascinating things with standard dystopian tropes, and Anaiya’s personal arc is, quite honestly, superb. (That character resolution? Spectacular. Loved it.) There are a lot of interesting ideas in the world that had real potential. But then the plot itself fell so flat. I didn’t even hate the love triangle that much because none of it felt like it actually mattered. There was a fair amount of violence in the book, but it never felt like it had real stakes.

I did finish it. I started writing this review as a DNF, but at that point I only had about fifty pages left, so I went ahead and finished it to see if my criticisms bore out through the whole book. And in the end, I’m glad I did, because even though one of the twists felt entire out-of-the-blue and I guessed the other, the wonderfully satisfying resolution to Anaiya’s personal arc was worth it. Resistance isn’t a bad book, per se. I think I’m just disappointed that so many good ideas got a lackluster, stakes-less plot that didn’t do them justice.

The Divided Elements series:

1. Resistance
2. Rebellion
3. Revolution

Review: Battle Royale

Title: Battle Royale

Author: Koushun Takami

Genre: Dystopian/Thriller

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of children, blood, murder, gun violence, injury, death of parents (mentions), grief, pedophilia (mentions), trafficking (mentions), sexual assault (attempted), sexual content, homophobia (mentions), rape (mentions)

Back Cover:

Koushun Takami’s notorious high-octane thriller is based on an irresistible premise: a class of 42 junior high school students are taken to a deserted island where, as part of a ruthless authoritarian program, they are electronically collared, provided with weapons of varying potency, and sent out onto the island.

If they are in the wrong part of the island at the wrong time, their collars will explode. If they band together to save themselves a collar will explode at random. If they try to escape from the island, they will be blown up. Their only chance for survival lies in killing their classmates.

Review:

This was a recommendation from a friend (the same friend who got me to read the Dark Tower series, incidentally). It’s the original “kids forced into a game where they kill each other until only one is left” story. It pioneered the idea that The Hunger Games made mainstream, gave a name to the entire battle royale video game genre, and the book where Fortnite got 95% of its rules and mechanics. Forty-two fifteen-year-olds are together on an island, and only one can make it out. (It is clarified that they’re fifteen, Japanese junior high is apparently a different age range than American junior high.)

Think of some adjectives that might describe a book like that. You might think of words like “violent,” “gory,” “dark,” and “bloody,” or perhaps even “sad” or “horrifying.” But I bet you won’t come up with the two words I’d use to describe the first half of the book: “Slow” and “political.”

The class starts with forty-two students, but our protagonist is Shuya, who teams up with his best friend’s crush Noriko and standoffish transfer student Shogo for the duration of the contest. The killing starts immediately, and the story switches perspectives often to show how everybody dies, but it keeps coming back to Shuya and Noriko (and Shogo after he joins them). For roughly the first half, Shuya and Noriko hide and talk about how they can’t believe their classmates are just killing each other, and after Shogo joins them there are several long political monologues discussing the fascist government that made this dystopia happen and all the problems with authoritarian governments. It’s a little weird going back and forth between Shuya and company’s story – which is mostly survival, disbelief, and political discussion – and the violent deaths of their classmates.

Reading this as an audiobook was not the best way to read it. The narrator kept the same patient tone of voice regardless of whether he was talking about sports, politics, or kids killing each other, and since I’m not very familiar with Japanese names, it got very confusing to keep the characters straight. It doesn’t help that there’s forty-two of these kids and many of them have names that sound very similar when spoken – Yukie, Yumi, Yuki, Yuko, and Yuka are five different characters. The descriptions, conversations, and deaths were sometimes difficult to follow, as I had to take a moment to figure out which classmate was currently being discussed.

About halfway through, Shuya and Noriko finally accepted that their classmates were killing each other and Shogo ran out of things to say about politics, and the story finally picked up. Despite all the deaths, it didn’t feel like the action got started until this point. After that, though, the action picked up, the plot started moving, and I actually started liking Shogo as a character. The rest of it ended up being pretty good, and there were two minor twists at the end that I did not see coming.

Battle Royale was not entirely what I was expecting. Yes, you get the gore and horror and survival elements of a bunch of kids stuck on an island until all but one is dead, but there’s also a remarkable amount of commentary on fascism and authoritarian governments, and considering the deaths start immediately, I found it surprisingly slow to start. But I pushed through, mainly because a friend recommended it, and it did get better. Overall, it was actually pretty good. Definitely not my favorite, but solidly good.

Review: Fahrenheit 451

Title: Fahrenheit 451

Author: Ray Bradbury

Genre: Classic/Dystopian

Trigger Warnings: Fire, fire injury, death, suicide attempt, murder, needles (mentions)

Back Cover:

Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.

Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television ‘family’. But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people did not live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television.

When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

Review:

I read this book in high school, but I remembered literally nothing about it – to the point where I didn’t even remember I read it until I found it on my list of books I’d read in 2011. I also apparently rated it 3 stars on Goodreads, and I wish I’d written a review because I’m curious what I thought about it ten years ago.

My rating this time around is going to be 2.5 (because I use The StoryGraph and it lets me do half stars). I can see why this book became a classic, but it is so, so boring.

The main plot in this story is Guy, the protagonist, is a fireman whose job is to burn books because owning books is illegal. He meets a teenage girl who lives next door and is weird because she likes to think and it gets him to think (and I was very, very relieved that the book did not go the 30-year-old man starts a relationship with a 16-year-old girl route because it felt like things were headed that direction for a while). He saves a Bible from a house that he burned, reads it, and absolutely loses his mind that books say things. Then he torpedoes his entire life because he doesn’t know how to deal with the fact that he read a book.

I mainly was frustrated with him because he just could not keep his cool. Perhaps that’s just because I’m very good at acting normal even when my emotions are a disaster, but I couldn’t relate to or understand his inability to keep his mouth shut. Being found possessing books means you’re arrested and your house is burned to the ground, yet Guy could not stop showing his illegal books to everyone. Like, for heaven’s sake, dude, how are you so incapable of just not telling everybody you’re breaking the law?

This book does have some poignant things to say, which is probably why it became a classic. One of the main themes is how modern people don’t want to think for themselves or have to consider any moral grey areas, they want to be told the right opinions to have and be consuming mindless entertainment constantly – which is a tendency I’ve noticed in my own life, despite the fact that I also adore books. The other themes, though, seem to be “Guy is an idiot” and “the old classic books are infinitely valuable.”

Which brings me to an interesting theme of all three classic dystopian books I’ve read (Fahrenheit 451, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Brave New World) – they’re all worshiping at the feet of the old classics of the Western canon. Nineteen Eighty-Four is the most subtle (with the protagonist simply part of the government office that rewrites the classics to fit the Party’s platform), but all three seem to have this belief that this canon of classic books is of infinite worth, society knowing the classics will prevent all tyranny, and it is worth dying to preserve them. Which is wildly bizarre to me. I deeply love a great many books, but I don’t think any book is so valuable that it is worth preserving at the cost of human life. And having four years of high school English where everyone is forcibly exposed to Shakespeare doesn’t seem to have fixed anything about American society.

Although the protagonists are the special ones who comprehend the great ideas behind the worshiped Old Classics, so maybe the moral is actually that the common folk just need to let the intellectual elite be in charge and that will solve all our problems. Either way, it’s not a moral I particularly agree with.

I get why Fahrenheit 451 became a classic, because it does have one good thing to say and its dystopian society was a new idea when it was published. But the only plot is Guy not being able to handle that he read part of a book, and that’s not much of a plot at all. The descriptions were also on the excessive side and several times I forgot what was being described before the description finished. In my opinion, not worth the read.

Review: 1984

Title: Nineteen Eighty-Four

Author: George Orwell

Genre: Classic/Dystopian

Trigger Warnings: Torture (graphic), abuse (graphic), brainwashing (graphic), violence, antisemitism, sexual content, rape (mentions)

Back Cover:

In the year 1984, much of the world has fallen victim to perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, historical negationism, and propaganda. Great Britain, known as Airstrip One, has become a province of a totalitarian superstate named Oceania that is ruled by the Party who employ the Thought Police to persecute individuality and independent thinking. Big Brother, the dictatorial leader of Oceania, enjoys an intense cult of personality, manufactured by the party’s excessive brainwashing techniques. The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a diligent and skillful rank-and-file worker and Outer Party member who secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion. He enters into a forbidden relationship with a colleague, Julia, and starts to remember what life was like before the Party came to power.

Review:

I first read Nineteen Eighty-Four in high school. Being homeschooled, there wasn’t any discussion or context for it, my mother just handed me a list of classic books she read in high school English and told me to have at it. I remember very few of the books I read off that list, but I do remember I hated Nineteen Eighty-Four. Absolutely loathed it. I read a lot of dystopian back then, but it was young adult dystopian (riding on the success of The Hunger Games and mostly following the same formula) where there were rebellions and the heroic protagonists overthrew the evil government by the end of the trilogy. A dystopian book where the protagonist wasn’t “good” and the evil government won was inconceivable to me. Plus there was sex in this, and I was very much not comfortable with that.

I picked it up again because I read Brave New World, another classic dystopian written about a decade before this book, and I wanted to compare the two. I didn’t end up doing a lot of comparing, though, because I was reexperiencing the story. With the benefits of having enough adult awareness to see the many ways the world is screwed up (and the maturity to not immediately throw the book in the “not suitable for Good Christian Readers” pile the instant sex is mentioned), I was able to read it in a whole new light.

From endless wars where the enemy changes but the demand for patriotism doesn’t to constant government surveillance to strong stratification between upper and lower classes, much of this book maps directly onto my modern experience. The Party has a distinctly communist feel, but I don’t know if that’s because George Orwell actually feared the oppression would come from communism or because he just took a lot of imagery and ideas from the Soviet Union for the Party. (Wikipedia suggests he opposed totalitarianism in all forms, not specifically communism.) I found the telescreens used to both broadcast and spy highly ironic, because I’m pretty sure TVs don’t have the technology to broadcast our actions or words back to anyone but our phones sure do and we voluntarily take them everywhere.

You can read this as an interesting dystopian with elements of current reality, or you can let it make you really depressed. I went back and forth on how I was experiencing it. But I finally understand why this is a book people make high schoolers read.

Since this is a reread, this review has more been about my changing understanding of the book than the book itself. It is well written, with a solid world dominated by a totalitarian government, a fairly unlikeable narrator that you manage to root for anyway and a fairly unlikeable love interest who is nevertheless relatable, and a really horrifying amount of brainwashing torture that spans roughly the last third of the book. It’s quite good, and shockingly prescient considering it was published 72 years ago. I don’t think it’s one that I’ll reread repeatedly, but reading it again with adult eyes was definitely worthwhile.

Review: Upright Women Wanted

Title: Upright Women Wanted

Author: Sarah Gailey

Genre: Western/Dystopian

Trigger Warnings: Death, execution, gun violence, blood, homophobia, transphobia, misgendering (by request for safety reasons)

Back Cover:

Esther is a stowaway. She’s hidden herself away in the Librarian’s book wagon in an attempt to escape the marriage her father has arranged for her—a marriage to the man who was previously engaged to her best friend. Her best friend who she was in love with. Her best friend who was just executed for possession of resistance propaganda.

The future American Southwest is full of bandits, fascists, and queer librarian spies on horseback trying to do the right thing.

Review:

This is a short, quick, and fairly enjoyable novella in a dystopian version of the American West.

Being so short, there isn’t a lot of worldbuilding. Librarians distribute approved materials, people get executed for having unapproved materials, it’s illegal to talk about Utah, and there’s a constant war going on somewhere in the country, and the rest expects you to have a passing familiarity with the western genre and fill it in with your imagination. Since it’s a novella and I do have a vague idea of how westerns work, it was fine. In anything longer it would have needed more.

This is definitely a character-driven book, focusing on Esther’s discovery that there are people out there like her (i.e. queer) and that being queer does not mean she’s bad, broken, or destined to hurt the people she loves. The society around her is very homophobic (and transphobic, the nonbinary Librarian requests to be misgendered around other people because it would be unsafe otherwise), but she definitely has a lot of the homophobia internalized too and much of her emotional journey is learning that it’s okay for her to exist as she is.

Of course, there is an external journey too, as the Librarians Esther stowed away with are delivering a “package” somewhere and also doing their job of distributing approved materials across the southwest. There’s gunfights, bandits, safe houses and not-so-safe checkpoints. They keep the story interesting, but the heart of it is the world telling these people it’s not okay to be themselves and love who they want and them standing up and saying they’re gonna do it anyway.

For a novella, it does have a lot of emotional depth, but it’s still a quick read. There are a lot of dark events and a lot of people dying so I would absolutely not call this light or fun, but despite being dark it is ultimately hopeful. If you like westerns and want to see a western with some queer protagonists, I wouldn’t hesitate to tell you to pick up Upright Women Wanted.

Review: V for Vendetta

Title: V for Vendetta

Author: Alan Moore (writer), David Lloyd (illustrator)

Genre: Dystopian

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, guns, consentual sex, attempted sexual assault, concentration camps, human experimentation, racism/racist terms, homophobia/homophobic terms, nudity, torture, imprisonment, drug use, dismembered bodies, pedophilia, excessive survellience/loss of privacy, brainwashing, rioting and looting, trauma flashbacks, spousal abuse, antisemitism

Back Cover:

“Remember, remember the fifth of November…”

A frightening and powerful tale of the loss of freedom and identity in a chillingly believable totalitarian world, V for Vendetta stands as one of the highest achievements of the comics medium and a defining work for creators Alan Moore and David Lloyd.

Set in an imagined future England that has given itself over to fascism, this groundbreaking story captures both the suffocating nature of life in an authoritarian police state and the redemptive power of the human spirit which rebels against it. Crafted with sterling clarity and intelligence, V for Vendetta brings an unequaled depth of characterization and verisimilitude to its unflinching account of oppression and resistance.

Review:

I am not a huge fan of comic books and graphic novels. When I’m reading, my brain is too tuned to words, so my default is to read all the dialogue, barely glance at the pictures, and end up with no idea what’s going on. Plus I’m face-blind, so if characters change clothes or hairstyles (or if, like this illustrator, all your women look exactly the same), I lose track of who’s on the page and it makes things even harder to follow.

I picked this up because my book club is doing assorted graphic novels for May, and V for Vendetta was the only one on the list I’d actually heard of before. I knew very little about it besides the fact that the character V tends to be idolized by incels and the like, and also an internet headcannon that V is a trans man.

The story follows a lot of characters, most of which were hard to keep straight. On one side, we have V, the Guy Fawkes mask-wearing vigilante who is against the totalitarian regime ruling England, and Evie, a young woman who V rescues and keeps around for some reason, slowly introducing her to his ideas and world. On the other side, we have various high-ranking members of the regime. So not only do you get V’s side of the story, you also get to see the regime members, how V’s actions are affecting them, and how they react. I thought it was actually pretty cool to see both sides. And you know, I’m against totalitarian regimes, so it was kinda fun to see V throwing them into such disarray.

I only say “kinda” fun, though, because there is not much fun about this book. It’s dark and brutal, in case you couldn’t figure that out from the very long list of trigger warnings. There are no good guys here. The totalitarian regime is bad, obviously, but V isn’t a hero. He has his own agenda and will stoop to many inhumane things to get it done. He is for anarchy, which is the exact opposite of totalitarianism – I don’t think anarchism is all bad in theory, but this book makes it look a lot like V’s better verson of society looks like every-man-for-himself, social-Darwinism chaos. At the beginning, I could kinda get behind V and his fighting the regime, but then he did something I couldn’t overlook. (spoilers) (He tortured Evie for several weeks, including with waterboarding, to try and “set her free” and bring her around to his point of view). He’s just plain abusive, and that’s when I realized there are no good guys in this story, just bad guys with different ideas of what the world should look like.

This book is 30 years old, and I get that standards for women in media were different in the 90s. But there are only two types of women in this world: sex workers and weak women who know nothing and need men to protect them, with the only exception being a woman who cuckolds her husband, abuses her affair partner, and wants nothing but more political power. And they all are drawn the same – skinny, pretty, and almost universally blonde, which is both a tad sexist and also made it really hard for me to tell the female characters apart.

I have criticisms of this book. Quite a few, actually. But it was an engaging story – interesting, gripping, and hard to put down. It’s dark, a bad kind of dark that leaves me thinking I really wouldn’t recommend it, but it wasn’t a bad story. I had some difficulties with it, mostly owing to the graphic novel format, but that’s just me. If nothing else, Alan Moore knows how to tell a good story.

Review: The Swan Riders

Title: The Swan Riders

Series: Prisoners of Peace #2

Author: Erin Bow

Genre: Dystopian/Post-Apocalyptic

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood, seizures, transhumanism (combining technology and organic life)

Spoiler Warning: This book is a sequel, and this review has spoilers of the first book, The Scorpion Rules. If spoilers matter to you, proceed with caution.

Back Cover:

Greta Stuart had always known her future: die young. She was her country’s crown princess, and also its hostage, destined to be the first casualty in an inevitable war.  But when the war came it broke all the rules, and Greta forged a different path.

She is no longer princess. No longer hostage. No longer human. Greta Stuart has become an AI.

If she can survive the transition, Greta will earn a place alongside Talis, the AI who rules the world.  Talis is a big believer in peace through superior firepower.  But some problems are too personal to obliterate from orbit, and for those there are the Swan Riders:  a small band of humans who serve the AIs as part army, part cult.

Now two of the Swan Riders are escorting Talis and Greta across post-apocalyptic Saskatchewan. But Greta’s fate has stirred her nation into open rebellion, and the dry grassland may hide insurgents who want to rescue her – or see her killed. Including Elian, the boy she saved—the boy who wants to change the world, with a knife if necessary.   Even the infinitely loyal Swan Riders may not be everything they seem.

Greta’s fate—and the fate of her world—are balanced on the edge of a knife in this smart, sly, electrifying adventure.

Review:

This book is intense. It’s not action-packed – in fact, most of the story takes place on a horseback journey across the Canadian wilderness – but oh god, the emotions.

This book has a bigger thematic element than The Scorpion Rules. Now that Greta is an AI, it asks the questions, “What is it that truly makes us human?” and “Can an artificial intelligence become more human?” Which are both very interesting questions to me, a person who is very uncomfortable with and kind of scared of transhumanism. The story leaves the second question ambiguous but does answer the first question – in a way that I liked but still felt a little clichéd.

There is a lot of really cool stuff in this book. There’s a lot more about the Swan Riders, including several major Swan Rider characters, and Talis the head AI is a major character (and actually quite enjoyable). The world and the other characters are all excellently done, and provide an excellent backdrop to Greta’s story.

Like I said in my review of The Scorpion Rules, if you don’t like Greta, you’re not going to like this book. This is very much her story, and not just because she’s narrating. She’s the first new AI in a while, she’s the first one in ages to look at being AI with fresh eyes, and her processing it, learning to deal with it, dealing with feelings of love and caring, and figuring out what it means to be AI and what it means to be human is the story. Sure, there’s a rebellion and some unexpected betrayal that adds tension, but that’s not really what the story is about. The story is about Greta, love, and the nature of humanity.

Which I had no problems with, because I really like Greta.

There were a few minor details I had issue with. The romance from the previous book, even though it wasn’t huge, was abruptly dropped. And a few of the AI-related details at the end got confusing. But the problems were small enough that I’m willing to overlook them – and besides, I was too busy enjoying the intensity of the emotions to worry about it.

I don’t think there’s going to be a third book in the series, and I’m okay with that. There’s room for one if Erin wanted to write it, but the series also wrapped up really well here. The ending is somewhat open, but it still brings the story to a satisfying conclusion. I thoroughly enjoyed this journey.

The Prisoners of Peace series:

1. The Scorpion Rules
2. The Swan Riders

Review: The Scorpion Rules

Title: The Scorpion Rules

Series: Prisoners of Peace #1

Author: Erin Bow

Genre: Dystopian/Post-Apocalyptic

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of children, blood, torture (physical and psychological)

Back Cover:

The world is at peace, said the Utterances. And really, if the odd princess has a hard day, is that too much to ask?

Greta is a duchess and crown princess—and a hostage to peace. This is how the game is played: if you want to rule, you must give one of your children as a hostage. Go to war and your hostage dies.

Greta will be free if she can survive until her eighteenth birthday. Until then she lives in the Precepture school with the daughters and sons of the world’s leaders. Like them, she is taught to obey the machines that control their lives. Like them, she is prepared to die with dignity, if she must. But everything changes when a new hostage arrives. Elián is a boy who refuses to play by the rules, a boy who defies everything Greta has ever been taught. And he opens Greta’s eyes to the brutality of the system they live under—and to her own power.

As Greta and Elián watch their nations tip closer to war, Greta becomes a target in a new kind of game. A game that will end up killing them both—unless she can find a way to break all the rules.

Review:

Oh, my god, the emotions. This book was on my most anticipated reads of 2019, and it completely deserved that space. I devoured it in a total of 3 hours and it’ll likely end up on my favorite reads of 2019.

So let’s talk about why I loved it so much: Greta. Greta is our main character and our narrator, and she is me. I don’t mean that in an “oh, she’s #relatable” way – in fact, a lot of the Goodreads reviews found her bland and boring – but she is exactly like me if I was in that situation. She’s a good girl, following the rules. It doesn’t even occur to her to try and change her fate; she puts her energy towards being prepared to die with dignity. She’s unobservant, especially when it comes to people. Erin Bow said Greta’s character was inspired by Spock, and as someone whose siblings jokingly called them “Spock” as a child, I saw myself in everything Greta was.

In the standard dystopian trope, it’s the rule-breaking rebel who saves the world. (Although whether or not there’s any world-saving in The Scorpion Rules is debatable.) But Elián, the rule-breaking rebel of this story, doesn’t do much saving. His fighting spirit is what wakes Greta up to the idea that they shouldn’t just lay down and wait for their own deaths, and then he recedes into a supporting role. He’s not even the love interest. He’s a good character, as far as characters go, but especially in the second half he doesn’t really do much.

If you’re going into this book thinking, “Oh, it’s a dystopian, there will be a rebellion and Greta and Elián will save all these kids and upend the political system,” then you’re going to be sorely disappointed. The plot is a slow burn, but to me it didn’t feel slow because I loved Greta so much. Nothing happens in the first half of the book. The characters are going about their lives, taking classes, gardening, and caring for goats. Greta’s emotional arc takes center stage, even when something actually does happen, and if you’re not prepared for character- and emotion-focused and action-less (or if you don’t like Greta), you’re not going to like it at all.

Speaking of emotions, let’s talk about emotions. Specifically, how vivid and visceral the emotions are in this book. I cried a couple of times. I felt the emotional horror of the torture. Perhaps it’s because I was so invested in Greta, but the feelings leaped off the page and straight into my heart. It’s one of those books that leaves you emotionally wiped out, but in a good way, at the end, and I loved every second of it.

Yes, this book does have its problems. There’s no real reason for the other children at the Precepture school to look up to Greta as a leader. (Although the fact that she’s the daughter of a queen is emphasized, so maybe that’s supposed to be the reason, even though literally every other child there is a ruler’s kid.) And the romance, though very, very secondary, comes out of nowhere with no reason or buildup. But the romance part takes up maybe 10 pages TOTAL through the whole book, so I’m willing to overlook that.

I really, really want to talk about the ending, because I have Thoughts about it, but there’s spoilers there. So I’ll probably talk about it when I read The Swan Riders – because there is a sequel and you better believe I’m reading it. I loved this book (though I can see why some wouldn’t), and I can’t wait to continue the story.

The Prisoners of Peace series:

1. The Scorpion Rules
2. The Swan Riders

Review: Fight For You

Image from Kayla Bain-Vrba

Title: Fight For You

Author: Kayla Bain-Vrba

Genre: Dystopian

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood/violence, sexual assault, whorephobia, sexualization of female characters

Back Cover:

Sold off to pay her father’s debts, Cherry spends her nights dancing and her days longing for freedom. Determined to break free of her life, she transfers from the dance halls to the stadiums, where all the real money is made.

The only problem with her plan is that she’s not a fighter. In order to learn, Cherry approaches Berlin, one of the best fighters in the stadium. Berlin, however, wants nothing to do with her, and Cherry realizes the hardest fights do not take place in the arena …

Review:

I was really excited about this book. It even made my Top 5 Want to Reads for this year. I guess the joke’s on me for getting so excited about the concept and not reading the reviews. This is the most disappointing book I’ve read this year.

So you know how based on the back cover, it seems like a lot of the story is going to be about Cherry convincing Berlin to teach her to fight? Yeah, Berlin agrees to train her on page 2. Right after their first kiss. Berlin gives Cherry an aggressive kiss after tackling her as a “show of dominance.”

Which leads me to my next problem with this book – Cherry and Berlin are both overly sexualized. At once point, Cherry says “I want people to see me as more than tits and ass,” and yet the author describes both girls mostly in terms of tits, ass, and how horny they make each other. There’s a lot of nudity. There’s a lot of random nipple sucking. There’s a lot of sexual situations that don’t fit the fact that these girls hardly know each other. And most of it reads like amateur erotica.

I don’t want to be That Feminist^TM, but this novella reads like it is by and for the male gaze. Cherry and Berlin are described in terms of sex appeal, their relationship develops through mutual horniness, and the level of physical intimacy they have as strangers is straight out of a random encounters erotica story. If there had been actual on-page sex when the girls had sex, I would call this amateur erotica with a veneer of gladiators slapped on top.

The pacing was also very bad. It moved much too fast and didn’t focus enough on anything to give either of the girls real emotions. The conflicts between Berlin and Cherry feel contrived and both girls get over them within a few paragraphs with no emotional growth shown, and you get no sense of the world (other than this is some sort of dystopian society where people or their family members are sold to work in The Zone if they can’t pay their debts).

A short list of other problems that I want to mention but not spend an entire paragraph on:

• Both girls act like sex work is awful/shameful/makes you less of a person.
• Two unnecessary sexual assault scenes.
• It’s not really clear how one actually makes money off the fights. Maybe betting on them?
• It’s mentioned offhandedly that the fights are mostly about the sex appeal – which is just, what???
• The line “You’re going to be turned on when you’re fighting.”

This could have easily been expanded into a novel – and I think with time to flesh out the world and the characters of Cherry and Berlin, this could have been at least good. Berlin has an interesting past, and Cherry at least has some family history that could have been explored. The world could have been interesting. And I still love stories about fighting in arenas for money. I’m mostly upset about this novella because it could have been good, and I wanted it to be – it just wasn’t.

Review: Lizard Radio

Image from Pat Schmatz

Title: Lizard Radio

Author: Pat Schmatz

Genre: Dystopian

Trigger Warnings: Gender-based violence, loss of a parent, death

Back Cover:

Fifteen-year-old Kivali has never fit in. As a girl in boys’ clothes, she is accepted by neither tribe, bullied by both. What are you? they ask. Abandoned as a baby wrapped in a T-shirt with an image of a lizard on the front, Kivali found a home with nonconformist artist Sheila. Is it true what Sheila says, that Kivali was left by a mysterious race of saurians and that she’ll one day save the world? Kivali doesn’t think so. But if it is true, why has Sheila sent her off to CropCamp, with its schedules and regs and what feels like indoctrination into a gov-controlled society Kivali isn’t sure has good intentions?

But life at CropCamp isn’t all bad. Kivali loves being outdoors and working in the fields. And for the first time, she has real friends: sweet, innocent Rasta; loyal Emmett; fierce, quiet Nona. And then there’s Sully. The feelings that explode inside Kivali whenever Sully is near—whenever they touch—are unlike anything she’s experienced, exhilarating and terrifying. But does Sully feel the same way?

Between mysterious disappearances, tough questions from camp director Ms. Mischetti, and weekly doses of kickshaw—the strange, druglike morsel that Kivali fears but has come to crave—things get more and more complicated. But Kivali has an escape: her unique ability to channel and explore the power of her animal self. She has Lizard Radio.

Will it be enough to save her?

Review:

I was going to wait to review this book until I had it sorted out in my head, but I’ve been thinking about it and I don’t think I’m ever going to sort it out. So heads up for a somewhat confused review written by a somewhat confused reviewer.

After I finished reading this, I tried to explain it to my fiance, which involved me giving a tangent-filled, disorderly, and increasingly agitated account of the events of Lizard Radio that ended with him completely baffled and me not even sure what I was trying to say. This book is hard to describe and hard to even wrap my head around.

Let’s start with Kivali. She’s right in the gray area between bender (transgender) and not, but chose not to transition. (In this world, transgender people are fine as long as they choose to transition before age 10.) I think bigender would be the best way to describe her, but I’m not really sure since she never gives herself a gender label. But anyway. She grew up with her guardian, Sheila, telling her that she was left behind by the saurians, a race of lizard-like aliens (I think?), and she kinda believes it. At least, she identifies strongly with lizards, to the point where she believes she has a lizard skin protecting her and occasionally has trance-like states where she feels like she actually is a large lizard. She also has lizard radio, which is like a psychic/trance thing where she gets visions of lizards and they talk to her … okay, it’s really hard to explain in words. My fiance suggested she could be schizophrenic – on one hand, it would fit, but on the other, so much weird stuff happens that some sort of supernatural/alien explanation almost feels like it makes more sense.

I thought Sully was going to get more page time than she did. She got quite a bit in the beginning as Kivali was falling for her, but in the middle and end not so much. For most of it, the romance angle was more Kivali dealing with her feelings than actually interacting with Sully. But she also had a close friend in Rasta and grows a friendship with Emmett and Nona, so it’s not like she was alone.

Then there’s the world. It’s some variety of dystopian world where the government has a lot of power and the value of community and working together are heavily emphasized – to the point where children between 15 and 17 are sent off to camps (like the CropCamp Kivali gets sent to) to learn how to get rid of their own individuality to become a community while learning a trade that will benefit society. But you don’t actually get a lot of the world. The story starts when Kivali gets to CropCamp and ends when she leaves, so all you really get is a microcosm of the world, ruled over by Ms. Mischetti, governed by gongs that announce when you can do things, and subject to strict regulations.

This book leaves you with so many questions. Is Kivali human or actually a saurian? What is lizard radio? How does this world even work? Is there a supernatural/alien explanation or is Kivali just absolutely insane? What is actually going on here? The plot is slow to start, and in the beginning the questions are what keep you hooked – how does this work? What does that word mean? But there aren’t answers. There aren’t ever answers. The questions are just left hovering in the air like the tension between two people who love each other but know it’s better for both of them if they just walk away.

This book is weird. It’s strange and unsettling and doesn’t make any sense – but at the same time it’s fascinating and beautiful and makes perfect sense. It’s dystopian without any of the grit. It’s paranormal without any actual paranormal events. It’s nonsense, but it’s fascinating, engrossing, wonderful nonsense. It’s a dystopian novel and a fever dream and Alice in Wonderland if Alice was part lizard and Wonderland was an agricultural camp.

I don’t have the proper words for what this book is. It’s one of those books where if someone asked if you liked it, you’d answer with “Well, it was interesting.” But it’s also one you can’t stop thinking about. As I told my fiance after finishing it, “Sometimes you finish a book and you just have to lay on the floor about it.” And I don’t know what more to say about Lizard Radio than that.