Author: Marie Lu
Publisher: GP Putnam's Sons
Rating: WARTY
Yes, this is another nightmare. I haven't read a novel this bad since Divergent/Insurgent, and it's not just because it’s a dystopian novel set (where else? There is nowhere else, is there?) in the USA, but because it’s a young-adult first person PoV novel. Honestly? Why me? Why me - well, I've picked up this novel and put it back on the library shelf several times, put off by the 1PoV perspective and my dyspepsia with dystopia, especially of the YA strain, and actually this is worse than 1PoV: it’s 1PoV². The story begins in gold-colored type and alternates with black, each color representing one of two voices. They have to use the colored typeface because there really isn't any other difference between the two main protagonists: they're both supposed to be geniuses and they're both dumb as dirt.
Here's a funny aside: I went to an online thesaurus to look up 'dystopian' (I don't like that word and I was curious to discover if there were interesting or amusing alternatives - there aren't!). It found no matches for 'dystopian'! The thesaurus wrecks! Even the dictionary at that site (which is usually good) doesn't have it unless you remove the 'n' at the end. But that wasn't what was funny. The funny thing is the alternatives it offered to 'dystopian', one of which was 'most piano'. The page giving me the 'didn't find' notice asked me if I meant 'dustbin' (which is the British name for a trash or garbage can). I kind of like the idea that Day and June live in a dustbin world, but what I really want to do now is to write a novel set in a most piano world....
Sp what's with the gold typeface? That particular typeface would actually be nice if it were black. It sure beats the black typeface we are given, which is tired and boring. I thought that maybe Lu chose these for a real purpose, but no. The cover is grey but the fly leaves are gold. Gold leaf?! Golf lead? Geld Loaf? Glad Felo? A God Fell? I just wish we could 'defog all'.... The insignia on the cover is painfully obviously designed to emulate the burning circle on the cover of The Hunger Games, as was the design on the cover of Divergent. Seriously, is there not an original thought in the minds of any of the YA dystopia authors or publishers? Not one? Anybody?
I have to interject with an observation of the irony here of "Marie" Lu, who disguised her beautiful Chinese name - Xiwei (the name to which this novel is copyrighted) for no other reason than to conform to western standards, writing a novel about a girl who rebels! Does no one else see the hilarious hypocrisy in that? But it’s coupled with sadness, too, that we now have a veritable tsunami of tales like this: The Hunger Games, Divergent and so on, which the movie companies cannot wait to lay their green thumbs on (yeah I know I keep mentioning that one, but there are many others, too stupid to remember, much less list). You can’t really blame Lu for piling on, although she claims she got the idea for this story from reading Les Miserables, another story which I'm probably going to have to add to my reading list now! I did find it interesting that this novel came out in 2011, right along with Divergent, just three years after The Hunger Games made YA novel headlines. I'm surprised it took them that long to write drivel like this. Indeed, 'The Miserables' would be a better name for Lu's novel given how sorry her two-dimensional characters are.
Lu has alternating sections which are labeled 'Day' (in huge lettering so we don't miss it!), which is the name, supposedly, of a nightmare: he's the most wanted rebel in the country, his story told in gold. No explanation is offered for his nickname. Why this joker is so wanted by the Republic is almost as big of a mystery as why the local military has consistently failed to catch a fifteen-year-old hooligan, but neither of those is as big of a mystery as the explanation for Day's vandalism, which is never given. We're expected to believe that his sole motivation is getting supplies for his family: clothes and food. How, exactly does that translate into setting fire to a bunch of military aircraft? All this tells me is that Day is a selfish moron. Instead of keeping a low profile and helping his family, he pulls ridiculous and fruitless stunts which raise his profile, run the risk of him being caught, and do nothing at all for his family. In the other alternating sections June Iparis is the new black. This regular typeface (how clichéd! - regular v. rebel!) is standard Times New Roman or some such. Whatever happened to the old Roman? No one knows!
The supposed 'bad boy' character, Daniel Altan Wing, aka "Day" (why not Daw?) boasts at one point: "When I was seven years old, I dipped a ball of crushed ice into a can of gasoline, let the oil coat the ice in a thick layer…" So was this gasoline or oil? Neither oil nor gasoline would coat a melting ball of ice that thickly (and would probably have doused the flames upon impact! LoL!). Given that we’re preached the temperature periodically on this novel (why?! Again, no explanation!), it’s way too hot for ice. Where did an impoverished seven-year-old even get the gasoline (or oil) and the ice in the first place, and how did he fire this into a police station by means of a slingshot without being seen and caught, and more importantly, without burning his juvenile hands off? Again, no explanation is ever offered.
Once I’d decided (which didn’t take long, rest assured!) that this novel was barely a pimple on the sorry ass of Divergent, which itself is a boil on the otherwise pristine and finely sculpted ass of The Hunger Games, I looked at some other reviews, and I have to wonder if the reviewers at the New York Times and at USA Today (and on some well-followed blogs) even read the same novel that I did (or read it at all). This was a "walloping good ride" and a "fantastic read"? The description: "brilliant protagonists" quite obviously came right out of someone's constipated ass. Praises like "Lu's genius" issued forth, causing me to ask: "What were these people smoking? Burning ice balls?"
There is a war going on, of course, but this time it's not north v. south. Instead, it's east v. west, just for the hell of it (although how any war can be termed 'civil' is probably the only mystery in this entire novel). How the war began goes conveniently unexplained as does pretty much everything in this story. The nation is split by a somewhat arbitrary line from "Dakota" to "West Texas" and Day is seen as fighting for the rebel "colonies" which occupy the east, although he's really only in it for himself and his family (or vandalism). Beyond that he doesn't care. That's the kind of vacuous "hero" he is. His brother is more heroic. Some think Day is fighting for the "patriots". Who knows? This novel is so confused that we have no idea what the difference is between those two factions, or even if they are two separate factions! The truth is that Day is fighting for nothing save his own agenda.
June is a soldier in training for the Republic (of course!). Both kids are fifteen. June is a genius, which begs the question as to why she's undergoing grunt training in college. She's the only one ever to be given a maximum score of 1500 on her SATs (Sub-Adult Triteness series), but of course, she's a rebel. We meet her as she's called to the principle's office to be picked up by her older brother (YA cliché alert: her parents are dead! Secondary YA cliché alert: their deaths are not what they seem) for climbing one of the city's tall buildings in emulation, of course, of the rebel Day who supposedly climbed one in record time. Worse than that, she was off campus! Yes, she's truly a rebel - going off campus. I mean good gods how could the authorities even countenance a rebellion like that?
Day is an outcast, of course; he has no Day job.... His mom thinks he's dead, and only his older bother knows the truth, but does Day care? Day stalks his own family, apparently on a Day pass, living Day to Day. We meet him hanging-out (almost literally) in a deserted building watching the soldiers down in the street below go door-to-door, marking those doors where "plague" is found with a large red 'X' (cliché much, Lu?). I suspect the plague is something fomented by one or other of the military powers because this is YA dystopia, so why wouldn't it be? When they reach his own family's house, they spend an inordinate amount of time in it before marking it with the 'X', and then drawing another line through the X vertically. Day has no idea what that means. Day is in the dark?!
Given what we learn later, this 'X'-ing makes no sense at all. The authorities know perfectly well where the plague is, and given that the house is marked fro quarantine, how in hell is Day's brother John still allowed to keep leaving the house to go to work? Again no explanation, no sense! It's so boringly obvious what's going to happen here that there's really no mystery to this novel at all except as to how something which was written this badly ever got published in the first place. Clearly the opposing youngsters will end up allied because they find something so astounding that it can unite even bitter enemies, and then it’s them against the world, a crisis which can only be resolved by two more volumes. No doubt the astounding revelation will be that the enemy are…Americans!
The only reason I finally jumped into this comedy of eras was that I heard that it was optioned for a movie by CBS Films before it was even published. IMDB lists it as "in development" which means no one is saying nuthin', y' hear? N u t h i n'! Clearly something is going on here, but the fact that the producer was tied in with Twilight abortion ought to tell you all you need to know about what a waste of electrons this movie will be. Anyway, this was why I decided I should probably read this and find out what underlies it all. The short answer is nothing, but nothing ventured, nothing gained, so here I am, stuck in the middle with Lu….
So Day's next plan is to go steal the plague cure from the local hospital for his family, even though this genius has neither a plan nor any idea whatsoever what the triple-line symbol on his family's door actually means. He covers himself in pig's blood (no word on where he actually found that in Los Angeles) as though he's been injured in a fight, and he heads into the waiting room where he sneaks through the abominably clichéd vent system to a stairwell (shades of Die Hard anyone?); then he runs (on a bad leg) up to the labs on the third floor. He discovers that they're fresh out of plague cure, so he escapes by dramatically diving through a solid plate-glass window and plummeting to the ground below, sustaining relatively minor injuries after a three-storey fall. But of course. Day is a super hero which is obviously how he survived. This boy glows Let's call him Day-Glo.
Lu needs to get real. Seriously. She's been watching way too much bad TV. While I will grant the very faint chance that Day could walk away (okay, limp away) from a three-storey plummet, bullets do not ricochet from fridge doors! Nope, they go right through the fridge door and kill you. But hey, bullets bounce off of Day-Glo. Did you know that he once scaled a four-storey building in less than five seconds? If you don't, Lu will tell you. Repeatedly. Yep. He's a super hero.
Metias is June's older brother. He's hit by a knife thrown by Day-Glo as the latter escapes from the hospital into the amazingly complex sewers. We're clearly told that the knife hits Metias in his shoulder. The next thing we know is that the military has - in just an hour or so - graduated Genius June (let's call her Junius) from college early, and assigned this untrained, inexperienced, and undisciplined (unless you count the fact that she's been disciplined eight times this semester and is currently under a school suspension) to track down her brother's killer! Commander Jameson, her brother's commanding officer, first shows Junius her brother's dead body - but miracle of miracles: the knife that Day-Glo threw which hit him in squarely in the shoulder has now transferred itself to his chest where it pierced his heart and killed him!
I guess the military no longer wears body armor? But screw that: there are magical self-motivated knives in Lu-world? Hey, she stole that idea from the movie The Shadow! No, actually there's something else going on here. Someone removed the knife from his shoulder and deliberately plunged it into his chest to insure that he died. My suspects were Thomas, Metias's second-in-command, or Commander Jameson herself, but now, genius Junius is Day-Glo's sworn enemy, so I'm even more sure that they will sack-up together. And she's placed into her brother's unit, under the command of Thomas. I was even more sure that there would be a triangle until Thomas began doing stuff that made even Junius notice, so I changed my mind on that one! More on this anon. After three days, Junius Christ resurrects herself and heads on in to work, determined to kill Day-Glo.
Lu's world makes no sense. When June needs to dig up information on Day-Glo, instead of perusing the military's intelligence files, she surfs the Internet! In a dystopian, dysfunctional, impoverished, warring USA, where even the military is short of money, where earthquakes, flooding, and war have ravaged the country, where the western USA's population has plummeted to a miserable 20 million from maybe 150 million, there's an Internet? I wonder if it has a good thesaurus? In a flashback, Lu has Day-Glo meeting Tess, and he's stealing food from a restaurant. This is in a dystopian society (ravaged by war, etc., etc.) where the poor are of Dickensian proportions, yet there's a restaurant?! Who in that neighborhood - or any neighborhood near it - can afford to go to a restaurant? I don't think Lu really grasps what 'dystopian' means, which is hardly surprising since it's not listed in the online dictionary, but couldn't she extrapolate from 'dystopia' which is listed?
Tess and Day-Glo between them have a fortune in "Republic Notes" (is that like Republican credits?! Just remember that Watto: will not accept these.) and there's never any explanation offered for how they came by this money, especially given the 'going out of style' rate at which they spend it, and their lack of success with gambling (more anon)! Day-Glo always works alone - apparently he's the only person in the entire city who cares about his family. He has neither friends nor casual acquaintances he's met in the course of his criminal dealings. Oh, and people still own cars in the poorest section of town - or at least drive through it - through a part of town with nothing to offer, and riddled with thievery and people on the make. Maybe they're going to a restaurant?
Captain Thomas kisses one of his own soldiers (who happens to be Junius, of course) on the cheek? Seriously? Can Lu say, "conduct unbecoming"?! Thomas is inappropriate all around; even though June is now under his command (ooh baby!), he still addresses her as "Ms. Iparis"! Later on he kisses her again, but this soldier's aim is so bad that he misses her lips. I definitely made a mistake in considering him for the third leg in a triangle - unless it’s a triangle of villains. Even a dunce like Junius isn't quite stupid enough to get involved with this psycho.
The problem is that Lu's writing is so flaky that it's hard to tell if she simply has no idea what she's doing (which is the direction in which all evidence seems to point), or if she's actually conforming to some sort of bizarre plot. "How smart is Junius?" is a really good question at this point, and it has nothing to do with her putting up with Thomas's inappropriate behavior, (although it should!). When she came up with her 'brilliant' plan (which took her three days) to lure Day-Glo into a trap - which was never actually organized and never sprung! - Day-Glo recognized her as a government agent from the official way she fastened her coat! Yet she's championed as a genius who is the only one in the entire Republican military who can go undercover and find him?
The ham-fisted (I use that term advisedly!) way Lu chooses to introduce Day-Glo and Junius is to have them meet at a Skiz - a street fight (not that Lu ever defines it or explains - given that it's just a street fight - why it has to have that name) - where Day-Glo sends Tess to bet pretty much their entire wad on the outcome. This is interesting, because at the start of the novel, he's told us that he has 2,500 notes - enough to feed them "for months", yet now he's betting the bulk of what’s left of that (1,000 notes - they blew off almost 50% of their stash in a handful of days!) on a Skiz fight. It makes no sense whatsoever. Why would he risk losing enough money to feed them for (50% of) "months"?!
He wins the bet on the first fight, but when Junius steps in to fight, he bets against her and loses it all. My question here is not, "How stupid is Day-Glo" (that's already been answered satisfactorily), but how all this money comes to be floating around if people are so impoverished that half of them are scouring the garbage outside all those flourishing restaurants in the impoverished neighborhoods? It makes ZERO sense. Junius didn’t even plan on getting into the fight! She steps in to help out Tess - another serious mistake on her part. How many mistakes has the brilliant, genius, military wizard made now? I've lost count.
Lu can't even remember what she wrote from one chapter to the next. In one chapter she has Day-Glo ready to go break up the fight so Tess won’t get her ass kicked, and in his next chapter he's saying that he would have let Tess fight and get beaten just so he could win his bet. Actually Lu can't even remember what she wrote at the start of a sentence by the time she finishes it (see example later, when Day-Glo is captured and chained, King Kong like, to a roof!). Oh, YA trope alert: Junius has gold flecks in her eyes! How original! I'm sure Day-Glo does too. His are probably blue, because god forbid we should have a male trope whose eyes are brown - the most common eye color on the planet. Lu has Day-Glo lusting after Junius from the off. He imagines kissing her and running his fingers through her hair. Ri-ight - because that’s what all fifteen-year-old slum-boys think about when they see a hot girl.
So inevitably, the inevitable kiss comes inevitably between the inevitable two of them, and we discover that Junius has the amazing power to determine from his lips how many other girls Day-Glo has kissed! Wow! So they have the requisite day and night (with the requisite gentle Day-Glo gently tending her requisite wounds) so we can be sure there's been more than enough time for them to inevitably fall in requisite love. Day-Glo is supposed to be not only a genius, but also to be street smart, and yet he instantly trusts Junius - the suspicious girl he's just picked up on the street, who has suspiciously shown up out of the blue right after he was suspiciously invited to get suspiciously free plague drugs that could cure his brother? Some genius. Then Junius calls in the army to pick up Day-Glo's family, and she lures Day-Glo to the scene so they can pick him up, too. What a pity they don’t just shoot him on sight on site. Instead, they shoot his mother. Now the two are matched again, both of them being fifteen-year-old, rebellious, athletic geniuses who have lost a loved one.
But that's where Lu falls on her face again. Day-Glo is sentenced to death without a trial, in front of a mass of public onlookers, but they don't shoot him then and there. Instead, the sentence is to be carried out in four days time. Why? Explanation for this is neither given nor would make any sense whatsoever, so we know that the only possible reason for the four-day stay of execution is for Junius to rescue him, or for him to escape. Instead of returning him to his cell, though, they chain Day-Glo to the roof of the building - again with no explanation except that it would be far easier for him to escape from there: recall that we've been told several times that, like Superman, he can leap tall buildings in a single bound, yet inexplicably, Junius is the one wearing the cape! But then she is Supergirl.... And despite knowing all this about her beloved Republic, genius Junius still hasn't seen the light!
I know it's hard to conceive, but if there's one thing worse than Lu's plotting, it's her writing. She actually writes this on page 190: "A bright streak of blood stains one thick strand of my hair, painting a dark red streak into it." I am not kidding you. So is this blood bright or is it dark? It can't be both. Where the hell was the editor when that asinine line was written?
So Day-Glo is up there on the roof, and he's pretty much dying after being beaten and tortured because we have to make the guy suffer so his mortal enemy can pity him, ergo instadore. You know how that goes. So he's been dehydrated and starved into delirium, but as soon as Junius appears, he magically snaps back to rationality and cold hard logic and he starts telling her of his suspicion that the government is poisoning the poor. The fact of the evil government testing strains of plague on the poor is something we average intelligence readers knew pages and pages ago, but it's just now occurring to genius Day-Glo. It hasn't even remotely crossed Junius's transom yet, but she warns Day-Glo that he's on dangerous ground speaking such treason! SERIOUSLY? He's been sentenced to death, for gawd's sake! He's actually on the verge of dying through ill-treatment, and this genius warns him that he's making treasonous statements? Excuse me whilst I go retrieve my ass. I just laughed it off. Again.
This novel is utter trash and warty and that's all there is to it.
