Author/Editor: Amy Engel
Publisher: Entangled
Rating: WORTHY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is reward aplenty!
I have to say, right up front, that this novel was a real roller-coaster ride, and not in a good way. I had so many issues with it, and I was thinking right up until about the half-way point that I wasn't going to finish it, let alone rate it positively, but I managed to read it all the way through to its inevitable cliff-hanger finale, and in the end I decided it was a worthy read! Weird huh?
Maybe it's my co-dependent relationship with Entangled, or maybe I was bemused by the fact that the author's name, Amy Engel is vaguely like an anagram of Entangled. Maybe it's because I have an adorable niece named Amy, or because my favorite nurse was named Amy. but there it is. And yes, though neither the front cover nor the back-cover blurb will tell you this, it's book one of a series. Judging by current YA trends, I'm guessing it's going to be a trilogy.
Here's the real mystery: why do they publish a "Praise for..." page in an ebook? In a print book I can see some theoretical merit if you lift it off the shelf at the library, or in a bookstore (are there still bookstores?), you can read what people you don't know, have never met, and have no means by which to gage their opinion, thought about this novel. It doesn't work with me, but maybe it works for others. But in an ebook? You already have the book. You already bought it based on the blurb or the recommendation of someone you do know and trust, so pray tell me what exactly is the point of a recommendation for a book you already own? I have no idea.
Here's something else I have no idea about: what's the deal with the cover image? I've now read this book, and still I have no idea what the image on the cover is supposed to represent. There is no knife involved in any way in the plot to murder Bishop Lattimer, so why the knife?! The locale in this story is a small town. There are no skyscrapers. I don't do covers because my blog is all about writing, not strutting and preening, and I understand that writers don't get any real say in their cover (unless they self-publish). Normally I pay little attention to them, but once in a while one comes along and demands a whisky-foxtrot-tango expression of complete disbelief. Such a one is this. Enjoy!
OK, enough rambling. So what's it all about, Amy? The basis of this story is the same one as is employed in employed in Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge, where Nyx has to kill her newly betrothed: a demon who rules the land. She fails to carry it out, too, but she at least tries initially. Ivy doesn't even progress that far.
The Book of Ivy is also really Matched (with which I'm familiar, but haven't read). Ivy Westfall's match is Bishop Lattimer, who is not actually a bishop, but then Ivy isn't actually a plant...! There are two sides (this is of a town, not a nation or a continent: Westfall and Eastglen), but there are two sides: the winners and the losers. The losers have to offer up their daughters to the sons of the winners for brides, and it's Ivy's turn to be offered up, but she has an agenda.
So far so good, but I kept running into minor irritations, which if they are few and far between don't bother me much. It's when there are too many of them that the novel has to really deliver to get me to keep reading it and not give up in sheer frustration. The book of Ivy came very close! I mean there are the usual irritations which I hardly even notice any more: like the use of "bicep" when it's "biceps". I don't think this author "stepped foot" into that one, but she did use "two choices" when it's really one choice between two options. One amusing issue was that the town had a summer camp! This tiny town sent kids to summer camp? Where? Round the corner? In the meadow in the back yard? This made no sense, but it was as amusing as hell.
Those were nowhere near as bad as things which made me stop and think about how "X" managed to exist in Ivy's world where 'X' represents one of a slightly bewildering variety of things. So let's talk about that. In 2022, there was a global nuclear war, where EMPs apparently rendered all electrical devices, including motor vehicles, useless. So in this novel, we're conveniently back in Victorian times, yet Ivy seems to have everything she needs: electricity, clean running water, a shower, soap, and so on. Apparently no one was left alive who could do anything to fix the cars, but they fixed everything else?
After the nuclear war, Ivy's grandfather started a new town in Missouri. Apparently there was nothing there worth bombing and nuclear fallout miraculously didn't reach there! This is the town over which the war with the Lattimer faction was fought. Why the Westfalls didn't simply leave after they lost goes unexplained. What the war was actually fought over goes largely unexplained.
What I don't get is how solar panels are working just fine, but nothing else electrical seems to be! It makes no sense. People wear jeans and t-shirts presumably made from the cotton they grow, but there's no word on who makes them or how. They have candles and meat and milk and butter (and guns), but the population is only supposed to be some 8,000 (as far as I could tell), and the entire town is ringed by a fence, so where are the crops grown, and by whom? Where are they raising the livestock? Who is making all these cool things they still have? Who generates the electricity and how? None of this is explained. The world-building in Ivy's world is awful.
Maybe this will all be explained in one of the sequels, but I didn't really get why this was set in the future instead of back in the nineteenth century. The very same story (with some minor adjustments for technology) could have been told just as well in 1880. Or 1780. It's not consistent, either, as the solar panel issue revealed. Another example of this is that there's talk of testing something for fingerprints. Now fingerprinting has been around a lot longer than modern technology (in fact a lot longer than most people would guess), and it was started down the path to modern formalization back in 1880, but in a town of some 8,000 random survivors, would there really be anyone who could read fingerprints and make comparisons competently enough to identify a perp? It's questionable at best.
It was really quite annoying that every personal color was described in terms of food: "toffee-haired" (ugh!), "brown sugar" freckles, "chocolate eyes and dark chestnut hair", "coffee-brown strands" of hair, "cocoa-colored skin". It became tedious after a while and then actually really amusing.
I also had a problem with how this society randomly married-off people. They were supposed to be "matched", but clearly the system wasn't working. Any society which pursued this bizarre scheme would be doomed to failure, which tells me right up front that these people are lead by morons. In the real world, in the past, the winners typically raped the daughters of the losers, and this isn't any different. Kings did seek to marry the daughters of their vanquished foes to 'cement an alliance', but the marriage was forgotten after a couple of generations, and the alliances died with the memory, leading to another war. It's pointless.
That's the story here, but it's only been going on for a couple of generations, and it makes no sense, because it's not a one-way street. Not only do the males from the winning side marry the females from the losing side, the same thing happens in reverse, so how is this a punishment for the losers and a benefit for the winners? I don't know, but it's what we're expected to believe!
There's no explanation, either, for how this society not only retrogressed technologically, but also socially, so that women now are now viewed, in only two generations, as nothing but baby machines, with no life of their own, nor is it explained how come there are so many sixteen-year-olds available for marrying off this year, given how hard life is and how small the town is.
As I said, Ivy's "mission" is to kill Bishop. Why, we're not immediately told, but at least a part of it is in revenge for his father's murder (so we're told) of her mother. We know that she won't do it, because this is an Entangled romance and they have to fall in love, but it's not at all clear why she doesn't simply go ahead that first night and take him out. It's not until almost page fifty that we learn that there's a three month 'window' during which this mission must be completed. Obviously the real reason for this is solely so that the two of them can fall in love so she won't kill him, but it's never satisfactorily explained why there's this delay, only that irreversible and unspecified steps are now being taken and she cannot fail.
I was thinking it would have made more sense had her mission been to kill the president, Bishop's dad, but no, it's Bishop. Evidently the president will also be 'taken care of'. This initially made even less sense when she thinks there's a problem after she discovers that they're not going to live in the presidential mansion, but in a cozy little home for just the two of them. It's not until, again, around page fifty that we learn that she needs to be in the presidential mansion because there's something there she must find. It would have been nice to have known this a little earlier so the story made more sense and flowed better. I don't like mystery for no other reason than being mysterious.
So Bishop predictably doesn't touch her that first night - he sleeps on the couch offering no explanation for his unexpected and (supposedly) out-of-keeping behavior. This seems to throw a huge wrench in the works for Ivy - again, no reason specified. Bishop is predictably and tediously the trope male lead: tall, muscled, good looking, green-eyed, and white. No problem there, is there? Inevitably there's the "awkward' scene where she espies him half naked and despite the fact that she's supposedly hates him, she's all a-flutter and having hot flashes. It's pathetic how weak Ivy truly is at this point. This was actually about the time where I almost ditched this novel and moved on to something else. Fortunately, it got a lot better after that!
I was curious as to why there was pretty much zero curiosity amongst the people of the town as to what exactly was happening outside the town walls (which are literal walls of steel designed to keep out intruders and beyond which to banish offenders from the town). In this regard, it's very much like Erin Bowman's sad trilogy starting with Taken, but at least Bowman as the townspeople take an interest in the possibility of something going on outside the walls. Nothing like that happens in this novel, which seemed highly unlikely to me. The town's kids alone would have had dares about going outside the walls, and there would be, in two generations, a hoard of people contacting them from outside. None of this is satisfactorily addressed. Again, the world-building is lacking.
I found it really disturbing that Ivy finds Barbie dolls to be the "point of perfection" when they're actually anorexic and plastic in more ways than one. That speaks volumes about how shallow she is and betrays every word she utters and every thought she supposedly harbors with regard to feminist ideals. I guess even in the future, a woman's image of herself is grotesquely annexed and distorted by capitalistic designs on what a woman should be, promulgated largely by men. It doesn't help that the society in this novel has pretty much abolished women's rights - no word on how that ever got put in place, but all of this is strongly indicative of Ivy's lack of spine.
Chapter nine makes no sense at all. Evidently we enter some kind of a time warp. Ivy and Bishop take a walk on Saturday. He's taking her for a picnic. They get up at eight and set off, and have hardly walked anywhere when we learn that the sun is "high in the sky". When they arrive at their destination after walking only for a short time, Ivy is talking about the midday sun. It took them four hours to get there??? Weird! After they jump into the pond a couple of times from a bluff, Ivy reflects that "This has been one of the most carefree afternoons of my life"! Wait, it was midday, they jump into the pond twice, and suddenly the afternoon's gone and she's reflecting upon what a fun time it's been? Where is all this time going?! Weird!
Ivy has a passion for books bestowed upon her by the author in this novel. The book trope is a really lazy method employed by an author to make a character - usually a female - seem smart and deep, but in this novel, Ivy's every action betrays that image. She isn't very smart, and she isn't very wise, and she is shallow. Fortunately, this improves, otherwise I never would have been able to complete this novel. I thoroughly detest weak female main characters if they persist in being weak throughout the story.
So what turned it around for me? Ivy changed. She behaved in a way I did not expect and showed that she had become strong and self-determined. It took way too long to get there, but it did happen! That, I admired, and it's really the sole reason I'm rating this positively despite the numerous issues I had with the story, the plot, and the sad trope YA romance. Even that worked out better than I'd feared when I reached that abysmally clichéd bare, muscled,chest scene!
So, surprisingly, and after all's griped and done, I consider this a worthy read! That doesn't mean I want to read volume two, because I can already tell exactly what's going to happen there!
