Author: Ceri A Lowe
Publisher: Bookouture
Rating: WARTY!
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.
errata:
p175 "Are your team ready?" should be 'Is your team ready?"
p180 "I'm a just a mentor..." should be "I'm just a mentor..."
p186 "As the tunnel eked out into the underbelly..." just sounds wrong. 'Eked' isn't the right word here.
This is yet another clear rip-off of The Hunger Games style dys-trope-ian ethos and the god-awfully appalling Divergent disaster. Indeed, the cover of this one is such a blatant rip-off of Divergent that I'm surprised that I haven't read of the publisher being sued! I kept looking at this thinking it had to be a parody like my own Dire virgins but it isn't! And what's with yet another novel having a title that's shared by god knows how many other novels? I counted a dozen books with exactly the same title at B&N and that was only on the first screen!
So why oh why did I request to read this? Well, there are some differences, and I'm sorely overdue for a good dystopian trilogy after reading so many awful ones, right? Yeah, dream on! I am sorry to have to report that my hope was not fulfilled in this novel. This was a DNF, although I did gamely plow on through four-fifths of it.
Unless you self publish, you really don't have any say over the cover your novel gets, so that's not usually on the author. The author does the interior, and in this one, I was delighted to discover that it's not set in the USA! This was a big plus for me - finally someone is willing to break the mold! This was one creation I decided to give this one a try. You have to respect an author who grasps that the entity "USA" does not equal the entity "The World"!
Also in its favor is that this one is about a guy, not a girl (at least the dystopian end of it is), which is another big difference. Paradigm is set in London, which is an intriguing change, and it has a dual story line - one from a woman in the (near) present, and the other from a guy in the sad, bad future, so it was because of these marked differences (at least I had hoped they were marked!) that I thought I'd give this a spin and see how it goes. There has to be someone out there who can write a decent dystopian trilogy, right?
There's a nine-page prologue which I skipped. I don't do prologues. There is absolutely no call for them. If the story is worth telling, then it's worth labeling it as chapter one and enough of this prologue crap. I've seen trilogies where the second and third volumes have a prologue. Seriously? The first volume is the prologue to the second volume, and so on, so what's with a separate prologue?! I don't get that mentality at all.
The novel begins on the day the storms started. It's in the past (our present) where things are just starting to seriously go down-hill. We're actually in that place now, in 2014, but that's in reality. This story is fictional, and Alice Davenport lives on the ninth floor of a block of flats (apartments) in London. She's playing hooky from school because of a school bully named Jake Anderson. We’re told that Jake's stories - even the fictional ones he spreads about Alice's mother - gain legs because he was in London when Hurricane Alison hit and "Big Ben had toppled". How that's supposed to lend him veracity, I don't know!
A small point of order here! Big Ben is the name of the bell inside the tower, not the tower itself. Most people conflate the two. It's possible that Big Ben (the bell) could topple even without the tower doing so, but I guess we're meant to understand here that the whole tower went down.
On a second point, Hurricanes are not known to strike Europe. They don't typically work that way although Coriolis "force" does tend to bend their path into a rough U shape with the curve on the USA's eastern seaboard and the open end out in the Atlantic. Some hurricanes have, albeit very rarely, reached the UK. I remember staying home from school one day as huge gale-force winds ran through my home town over there. It wasn't a hurricane, but it was extremely windy that day.
Alice and her mom sleep on a shared, stained, smelly mattress on the floor of the apartment. Alice has been told that she must never ever go into the bedroom up the stairs, but was offered no reason why. Nor do we ever get such a reason! If we did, I missed it. She's reduced to stealing from the wad of cash her mother thinks she's secreted under the mattress, in order to bring home bags of groceries. Alice is stronger than she looks. I liked Alice herself, although at one point, right before I quit reading this, I started to go off her. She would have made a great hero in a story just about her, and with a bit more going on than was going on here, but her story just became tedious and stretched out, with very little happening, and I found myself hurrying through her sections.
Alice's mom works nights, and it's easy to imagine what it is she does when she goes out and doesn't return until dawn, but the day the storms began, she went out and never came back, so Alice was alone and felt physically ill. She was nauseated and ran a fever, and was too lethargic to pay serious attention when everyone seemed to be abandoning the apartment block and rousing everyone else to go with them. Some emergency or other. Alice didn't care.
Many years into the future, Carter Warren finds himself unfrozen from some sort of cryo-sleep and expected to run for the highly important position of Controller General, which he actually wants, because he thinks he can bring a whole slew of fresh ideas to the job - and maybe even find his missing parents. Carter discovers that he has two children: twins born the year after he was frozen. How weird is that? Those children may prove to be more trouble than they're worth.
Page 75 has this odd sentence: "The room was dim and Carter just about made his way to one of the other benches that were laid out in rows running from the door through which he had entered to the other side of the room." I can see what's meant by this, but the way it's worded suggests that it's missing something: like it should have another clause explaining why he didn't finish making his way over there. "Carter had just about made his way across the room when he was interrupted...", or "Carter just about made his way over there without tripping up, but he almost fell over right before he sat down. Otherwise I don't see the point of wording it that way. Maybe it's just me!
There are two other sentences that are like this on this same page. One of them isn’t so bad, but then this appears towards the bottom of the page: "...the one that presents the most impressive and impactful will likely win the day." The most impressive and impactful what? It needs something to explain that, or it needs to be re-worded so that it reads, "...the one that presents as the most impressive and impactful...." Hopefully these issues will be ironed out of the final copy. Ceri Lowe ought to get me to volunteer as a beta reader!
Meanwhile, back in the future, Carter learns that there are two other candidates for the position of Controller General, against whom he must compete, so once again we have a situation like in The Hunger Games and in Divergent, and it seemed like it might be just as brutal, but in the four-fifths I read it was not, thankfully - otherwise I would have quit it much sooner! This is not another Divergent, which makes it even more sad that the covers look so much alike. It's supposed to be an election, yet the three of them are subject to practical and psychological testing. This made no sense. If the tests can pinpoint viable candidates, why bother with an election? If the election means anything beyond a dog and pony show, then why do we have the testing?
In fact this whole process made no sense. We learn that the three candidates are each as different as chalk and cheddar, so how can all of them be ideal for the job? And so things see-saw back and forth between Alice and Carter, each section alternately revealing more about their life and their world. The Alice side just wasn't as interesting as the Carter portions and sadly, they also began to grow tiresome about half-way through this novel.
One thing I had a problem with on the Alice side was the underground tunnels. London is entirely awash in many feet of floodwater, we're told, yet a network of tunnels underneath London is dry? How did that work, exactly?! On top of that (so to speak!), we're given no explanation regarding from whence this endless rainfall, er, hailed! Yes, it rained heavily, but the rain ultimately comes from one variety or another of groundwater so the level overall doesn't vary a whole lot, and the flooding came on far too fast to be the result of melting of ice sheets.
There's another problem, too, and this is common to all dystopian fiction, and it is that of other nations. Where are they?! People in the USA too often think of it as the only nation on the planet, or the only one worth thinking about or living in, but it's obviously not. Each nation probably feels the same way to one extent or another, including Britain, but none of these nations exists in isolation, and that's the problem. This story is told in complete isolation from the rest of the world as though Britain - indeed, London alone in this case - is the only place on Earth! It's just not credible. If you want to make it credible, you need to offer your readers some reasons why it's this way.
I can't believe that every nation would perish so completely in exactly the same way that Britain did, or that there would be nowhere left which had power, or transportation. I can't believe that no one would come from any other nation to see if there are survivors in Britain. I can't believe that the emergency services and the military, and the entire Royal Navy would simply vanish, but that's the conceit which we're expected to blindly accept in this novel. Nowhere is this addressed, and I couldn't swallow it; it's too glaring of an omission.
So to sum up, I liked the Alice character very much. I really didn't; like any of the others. And the story was far too plodding, with really not much going on for page after page after page, and it just wore me down. I could not bear to read the last fifty of so pages when there are so many other books presenting such a powerful temptation.
