Author: Joelle Charbonneau
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Rating: worthy
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of my reviews so far, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley, and is available June 4th 2013.
I am not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review. Since this is a new novel, I don't feel comfortable going into anywhere near as much detail over it as I have with the older books I've been reviewing! I cannot rob the author of her story, so this is shorter, but most probably still be more detailed than you'll typically find elsewhere!
There's a free prequel to The Testing available here.
The Testing is very closely allied to The Hunger Games in plot, so if you can't get enough of that series, then this will probably keep you cooking until the next movie comes out! I had mixed feelings about the similarities, but in terms of technical achievement, the novel is well-written and I found only one error in it, which is pretty darned good for a galley proof. That was the use of 'decent' instead of 'descent' (p277). At least I assume that's what she intended - and no spell checker will catch that!
The Testing strikes me as being a really limp title for a novel, but let's not hold that against it! Given that it's billed as the Graduation day series, why not actually call it 'Graduation day'? A more serious charge is that it starts out disturbingly like The Hunger Games and has a lot of close parallels strewn throughout. it begins, for example, with a mom is getting her daughter ready for an important ceremony. In this case, the ceremony is a graduation, but it isn’t what you might think. These people live in a colony in what is evidently left of Iowa, USA. The country (indeed, the world), ninety-nine years before underwent the Seven Stages war - which had four stages of humans fighting and three stages of Earth fighting back. The end result was a massive environmental tragedy.
The most important part of the graduation for Malencia Vale is the opportunity for her to undertake The Testing, which if she passes, will allow her to go on to university and make the life she's dreamed of. When she's unexpectedly selected, she's overwhelmed by both joy that her dream is coming true, and by sadness because it will mean leaving her family, which, unlike in The Hunger Games, is a large one. She has several brothers, as well as both her mother and father, and she may never see them again.
Malencia is chosen along with three others from her colony, which is surprising, since there have been none taken from this colony for years. Evidently a school principal was protecting her students from being selected - but why? Did she know, just as Malencia's father seems to vaguely remember, what is to come for those who are selected for testing - and fail? The others who have been chosen along with Malencia are: Malachi Rourke, Zandra Hicks, and Tomas Trope. Sorry, that's Tomas Endress, who has hair falling over his forehead, and strong, calloused hands. So yeah, I was right the first time: Tomas Trope.
The night before she leaves, Malencia's dad takes her to one side and warns her not to trust anyone, telling her disturbing stories about his own testing years before, when bad things apparently happened, but which were (almost, but not quite) wiped from his memory. Having learned this from him, Malencia chooses (as the two personal items she's allowed to take with her other than two sets of clothes) a Swiss Army knife and a small communication device built by one of her brothers which has a compass in it and, she later learns, a recording feature.
Just as in The Hunger Games, once selected, the candidates set off for the capital, but in a skimmer, not a train. This is a means of transportation which apparently can suspend gravity (or perhaps it’s some sort of a GEV or ekanoplan which isn’t explained very well). As the journey progresses, Malencia notices that there's a hidden camera watching them, and when they break for lunch, the cabin they use also has hidden cameras. She secretly passes on this information on to Tomas while they wander around outside. Malencia thinks the testing has already begun.
I have to confess a certain amount of difficulty in suspending disbelief in that the society seems to have far more advanced technology at their disposal than we do, yet there are colonies like Malencia's which are struggling along as though they're frontier colonies from two hundred years ago. This is another parallel with The Hunger Games, and one which I had hoped would be explained as the story progressed, but it was not.
Their testing begins the first morning after they arrive. The man in charge introduces himself with "My name is Dr. Jedidiah Barnes." Actually that's his title and his name. If he'd said "I am Dr. Jedidiah Barnes," it wouldn’t have stuck out so starkly to me! I've noticed that people do this in real life, and I have no respect for it. Whether Charbonneau (amazing name!) intended this reaction in her readers isn't clear. I would guess not.
The testing goes beyond tough. It's quite literally brutal, which becomes apparent after the initial phase (covering history, math, science, reading) is over. There are 108 candidates, but we’re told that less than a fifth of these will go to the university. No explanation is given as to why the university doesn't simply take them all. If there were thousands of candidates, then I could see why they'd need to trim the number down somehow, but not for so few, especially when we know the need is great. This was a real problem with the suspension of disbelief for me, and I don’t mind having these problems in a story if they're explained (or at least addressed), even if it's a bit ineffectually done, but to let them just sit there in all their pristine starkness like a beacon to the nearest plot hole isn't a good idea!
As the testing continues, it becomes increasingly brutal and callous to the point of people dying. I still find this unacceptable because there's no justification for this cruelty and harshness, not even within the framework of the story itself. The penultimate test is about teamwork, which Malencia resolves and passes, but Roman, the guy who purposefully betrayed all of his teammates also passes. That makes no sense at all given the point of the test because Roman isn't even mildly penalized for his behavior.
The final test is very much The Hunger Games all over again. The remaining 59 candidates (other than a few who have died, we learn nothing of what happens to the failures) are taken to what’s left of Chicago. The final test is to survive and make their way successfully back to the testing center hundreds of miles away.
Some of the other candidates are aiming solely to kill off their competition, but this is senseless given that these people are supposed to be leaders. This part is a flagrant copy of The Hunger Games, which really didn’t make sense either, but in the framework of the story it did have a certain kind of 'logic' to it. There had to be a single victor and Katniss and Peta ruined that neat little plan by surviving together as a team. This naturally led to the events in books two and three; however, in The Testing, the plan is to garner 20 really excellent students from the hundred or so potentials, yet we have a complete free-for-all out in the 'wilderness" in this last phase of testing. Conceivably, every single one of the remaining 59 people could die! What, then, is the point? Where is the advantage to anyone, especially society? How did a people who had survived a vicious war get themselves into a position where the vileness continues, and is now perpetrated not by some foreign power, but by your own people? None of this is explained or even touched upon in any meaningful way.
And what’s to be the goal of this testing - to populate a university with homicidal savages? These are to be the leaders? Where is the outrage from the colonies that so many talented and skilled young people disappear, never to be seen or heard from again? Where is the outrage from the students who survive? Is the brain-washing so good that not a single one of them remains even remotely suspicious about how they got there and what it cost? Are all of these supposed leaders nothing but cold-blooded killers?
I found it rather odd that a female writer, writing about a strong female protagonist would pen a phrase like this one: "...signs of the destruction man can cause against his fellow man." How genderist is that? The pendulum swings both ways, but the only way to stop genderism is to halt the pendulum in the middle and never let it swing again. Swinging it over in one direction in order to try and make up for it having been swung too far in the other direction is doomed to failure. Charbonneau should have written, "...signs of the destruction humankind can perpetrate against their fellow humans." or something along those lines. Unless, of course, she actually wanted to blame all men and no women for the destruction caused by the war, which, of course, is again genderist.
We learn more about the war during this final survival journey, and given what we’re told about the chemical and biological weapons used, and their (specifically-mentioned) long-lasting effects (to say nothing of radiation!), I find it hard to believe that they can find so many edible vegetables along their route and walk through bombed cities without suffering radiation poisoning. There's also a disconnect between the huge emphasis placed on testing and purifying water, when that's set against their unquestioning ingestion of one wild plant after another, one snared or shot game animal after another, with no testing whatsoever.
The parallels with The Hunger Games unfortunately grow, with Malencia garnering for herself a bow and some arrows, with her sleeping in a tree, with booby trap mines, and with mutated wild animals - specifically wolves - chasing her and Tomas. This latter is poorly done. I know it’s routine in movies to show humans out-running four-legged animals, but in real life it never happens, and the way this scene is written exacerbates the problem by having them successfully run one hundred and fifty yards to the road, get on their bikes, and pedal away to safety, whilst the wolves not only fail to catch them, but even decide to give up the chase? That part dropped me right out of my suspension of disbelief.
Fortunately for this review, my interest was revitalized as their journey continued and a strange man began randomly appearing. He twice tosses water and food to Malencia. Tomas never sees him. On his third visit, the man reveals that he knows Malencia's name. He claims he wants to help her because there's something seriously wrong with this system, and it needs fixing. Well duhh! But while he gives her a chemical which is supposed to counter-act the truth serum the successful candidates are given for their debriefing after this test, he really tells her nothing except to say that her family is at risk; no other information is imparted, so this part was nothing but frustrating. It made the guy seem completely pointless.
So after a few more (mis)adventures, only 29 make it over the finish line. We're told that 14 of those will be eliminated during the subsequent interview process leaving only 15 to enter the university, but this conflicts with what we were told earlier - that twenty could be accepted and this is later contradicted again as twenty are indeed accepted. But we are never told why it's twenty. Where did that arbitrary number come from?
While waiting for the final selection results, which takes a couple of days, Malencia discovers a recording feature on the nav-comm device she 'borrowed' from her brother Zeen. She records everything she can of what happened during the testing in the limited recording space available, and she hides the device in her clothes. So we of course finish with Malencia being selected along with nineteen others, and every one of them has had their mind wiped of everything which happened during testing; even old enemies are now good friends. Then Malencia finds the recording she left for herself.
It was this last part which changed my mind about whether I wanted to continue reading this series. I was pretty much done with it during that final phase of testing, but this mind-wipe, effectively resetting everyone back to a baseline intrigued me, and I find myself really curious to see what Charbonneau does with her tabula rasa. In this regard, this outdoes The Hunger Games because I don't see how Charbonneau can retell the same story in a different Guise as Collins did. She'll ve to come up with something different, and I'm interested to see what that is. So I'm going to rate this as worthy. I have no doubt that thousands of The Hunger Games fans will love it, but those who don't want to find themselves repeatedly asking "Now, what was that?" during their reading might want to think twice before deciding to grab this one off the shelf.
There's a short interview with Charbonneau by fellow blogspotter Lenore which amused me because in it, Charbonneau relates that if there were a theme song for this novel it would be Every Breath You Take by The Police. Her explanation reveals that she's sharper than many because she properly understands what Sting did in that song. It's funny to me because I've been listening a lot recently to the excellent Try (amazing vid here by Pink, and the first thing I thought of on hearing it was that Police song; then I thought that U2's With or Without You is actually even more reminiscent. Mashup anyone?!
