Rating: WARTY!
It was funny to start reading this one (note there are several novels with this same title; this one is by Joe Hart, and is the start of the inevitable YA dystopian trilogy I'm sorry to report). I was woken up by a massive crack of thunder and a heavy rainstorm with flash flood warnings on my phone, and having had a decently early night, I was no longer sleepy enough to doze off readily, so I started on the next book on my Net Galley list, which was this one, and it began with the lead character waking to a rain shower! I guess I liked the synergy, because I proceeded to blitz through the first 20% in short order. This means it moved and entertained, but I have to confess that a lot of it made little sense to me, and while I was leaning towards favorably rating this for a long time, there were, in the end, too many plot holes and problems. What really let it down for me was the ending.
The basic plot is young adult dystopian (are there any dystopians that are not young adult these days?! LOL!) but at least it's not told in first person. That counted for a lot with me, and it was the only thing which prevented me from DNF'ing this story once it started going downhill. It's set in a near future when a virus has evidently culled the female population dramatically, and the few precious youthful ones that are left are kept under guard in a facility where they're not even allowed pets for fear of disease. All the guards and the administration of the facility are male and they have no problem with institutionalized violence which is bizarre and, I have to add, not credible given how precious these girls are supposed to be. That said, this is a pretty decent microcosm of how women are far too often viewed in this world: they're useless if they're not young and pretty.
There appears to be only one older female in residence, and she's the teacher, but the students have only the one textbook, which is nothing more than a history of the plague and the revolution which followed, and which overthrew the US government. Clearly the author is using this as a very convenient device for info-dumping on the history of these United States of Dystopia, but it's still an info dump and it makes no sense that there would be no other books available, or that they would be simply reading this book over and endlessly over again in class. The reason for the absence of other books, if there is one, is never given, and that's part of the problem - there is far too much in this world which is simply there without rationale or reason, and it really tripped up credibility for me.
There were other issues too: given the total absence of books, where did Zoey get her math education? Given what was ultimately happening to these girls (which was pretty obvious from the start at least in general terms), why did the men bother to give them any kind of education at all? Why not just have them sit around and talk, and do crafts? Clearly education is a good thing and there are far too many places in the world where women are ill-served in that regard, but in this context, it made no sense, especially not given how badly abused these purportedly precious resources are in every other facet of their lives there.
Other things which are more a case of inexplicable presence rather than absence, are not explained either. Not only do we have to explain where the books came from, but more importantly, where is the food coming from and if the world outside the compound has gone to hell, then where is the food being grown? And cigarettes? Who is still making cigarettes for goodness sakes? Where are the batteries coming from? Where is the gasoline and Jet A fuel for the helicopters coming from? Despite info-dumping and, yes, monologuing from the villains at the end, none of this is ever explained. I can see how they might have guns, but where is the ammunition coming from if it was expended in the civil war? And why do they need to carry handguns in the compound given that they have armed guards on the compound walls and the females are outnumbered several to one?! I know women are dangerous, but seriously?!
What really bothered me is that no one inside the compound ever questions any of this. Main character Zoey and her best friend Meeka, who was sadly under-used, were slightly rebellious, but they were nowhere near far enough along that path to accomplish what came later, not to have it spring out of nowhere like it did.
A lot of rationale is missing here, too. When the girls reach twenty-one, they leave the facility, but no one knows where they go or what happens to them, other than that the girls supposedly rejoin their parents and live a happy life. Yet no one seems to question why they needed to be taken from their parents, evidently by force, in the first place, and no explanation for this is offered an no one questions it.
One of the biggest failings here was that the girls are disturbingly incurious about their lives or future. Although at least main character Zoey, and to an extent her best friend, are skeptics, which I appreciated, the girls seem to be very dull and incurious people overall. Only Zoey has any depth at all to her, and she would have been a much more appealing person had she exercised her mind more. I found myself wishing that Meeka was the main character instead of Zoey, but I often find myself liking the side kick character in YA novels than ever I do the main one. I think a lot of YA authors would serve their readers better if they wrote their first draft as they wished, then when going through the editing process, subtly changed the story sufficiently that their main character became a secondary one, and the best friend became the main one. What a wonderful world of YA that would bring us! But that's not going to happen unfortunately.
There is also bullying, even among the handful of girls here, which I thought was not merely overdone but ridiculous, and yet another subtle undermining of female bonding in YA stories. It's pathetic that there has to be an antagonist/bully, just like there has to be a love interest, although in this case, that particular aspect was dealt with differently. I'd be tempted to say it was handled better than most, but it made absolutely no sense whatsoever in the end, so I was forced to ask myself what the point was of even having it, just as I was forced to ask what the point was of the antagonism.
Obviously the sole purpose of the bullying to get Zoey into trouble so she's thrown into solitary which in turn toughened her up which in turn supposedly gave her the backbone to do what she did next, but it really didn't work. The bullying was such an obvious prop that it failed for me. It would have made more sense to me had Zoey done this alone, and it was written as a natural arc of her development, from curiosity to minor rebel to major rebel. This would have been organic and supported what happened later instead of undermining its credibility.
It seems more natural to me that women would bond in a situation like the one we're presented here, where the brutality is extreme. Women tend to handle social situations better than men do and I don't see them infighting in a situation where men are presented as such starkly caricatured bad guys in harsh black and white line drawings. To offset that tired trope (a bit) there is one handicapped girl named Lily, who seems to have some sort of intellectual deficit, but is treated as all the other girls are, although she needs help. Zoey has rather taken her under her wing, but the bullies predictably despise her. It would have been nice to go against trope and have one of the bullies adopt Lily, but that's not this story. It made no more sense that Lily would be treated as she was than it did that the girls would be harvested a the age of twenty one rather than at, say, eighteen, or sixteen, or even thirteen given what was going on here and how little respect the men had for the women as people.
To me, the revolution made no sense either. According to the info dump, hundreds of thousands rose up against the US government and overthrew it eventually, but there's no explanation for why this revolution took place, and none as to why there was not another group of hundreds of thousands rallying in support of the government. Again, explanations go wanting. I'm not someone who demands every detail be worked out. In fact, seeing how poorly some of these YA stories have been 'worked out', I'd much rather the author simply waved a hand at some (hopefully fairly reasonable) explanation and left it at that without digging into details, but, of course, then you get a travesty of a story like Dire Virgins - excuse me, Divergent, which was so laughably unsophisticated it read like a story written by a child.
I kept hoping that this one would not turn out that way, and while for the most part it was well written technically speaking, and left the absurdly gullible and simplistic Divergent in the dust, it also left too much to be desired. The ending was particularly disappointing for me. Just when I was hoping that Zoey would unleash hell on her captors, the story descended into drawn-out monologuing and interludes and piano-playing, and mindless meandering, and pointless chases, and it really fell apart for me. The ending was far too stretched out and didn't leave me satisfied at all. It needed some serious slash and burn to get it into shape I think this author has a future and I wish him all the best, but I cannot recommend this particular volume as a worthy read.
