I gave up on this pretty quickly. I knew going in that it was first person which I typically despise, but once in a while there's a good one comes along that's intelligently written and well-told. That's not this one. This one was tedious and boring, and I ditched it pretty quickly - I think right at the point where the narrator tells us that it's believed that outside the wall it's deadly to life, and then describes a bird flying over the wall - from the outside. Clearly if birds fly in and out unharmed, the lie that it's dangerous out there is exposed, yet this narrator is too stupid to put that two and two together. Sorry, but I do not need to read about stupid people narrating their own stupid stories. We get enough of that in the federal legislature. I just need to read about some of the Republican women in Congress and the Senate to get all the stupid females I can stand.
Dumb writing did not help this story one bit, but it is what I expect from YA novels these days. At one point, I read, "...and dark, black hair void of any color" Say what?! Black is dark. It's also arguably a color. Wouldn't devoid of any color be more like gray than black? (Even though gray is also a color). There were also renderign oissues. I read:
I felt (in regular regular font) the muscles in the arms under my head twitch and roll, (in tiny font) but I (back to regular font)Next came these in quick succession: "dead eye on the left side of her face," "Her vacant, scared eyes lingered on me," and "Her pupils dilated." That sounds quite contradictory to me.!
Worse, this is one of those stories where everyone inside the wall is depicted as being of one mindset. There are no dissenters, no protests, no rebellions, no conspiracy theories, because every single person believes exactly the same things. BULLSHIT. This kind of writing is amateur, pathetic, and completely inauthentic. And far too common in dystopian YA novels. That's why I gave this novel such short shrift because I've read it countless times before. The same novel. Only the names have been changed. YA means young adult - these are the very people who are supposed to rebel and hold radical ideas and to challenge authority and this almost never happens in these stories - that's how out of touch with reality their authors are and why they make their characters so uninteresting and conforming.
