Author: Lissa Price
Publisher: Ember
Rating: WARTY!
I wrote a positive (if weird and somewhat breathless) review of Starters which was this novel's predecessor, but I’d forgotten a lot of what happened in it, and my re-reading of my own review didn't help as much as I hoped it would to get me in the right frame of mind for this one! That review was written only a couple of months after I started this blog and it was actually quite interesting to go back and read myself writing a review back then!
Quite unlike the original, this sequel is a complete and nonsensical disaster. I mean that literally: nothing in this novel makes sense. It's like a really, and I mean really, let's hear it one more time, really bad B movie plot. I'm actually wondering if Price didn't get her ideas for this from watching daytime TV soap operas. The first issue I had with it isn't even the novel but the cover. I don't normally say anything about covers because this blog is about writing, and the writer has as little to do with their cover as the cover artist does with reading the novel, but these new covers are so bad I can't not say anything about them.
The cover not only of Enders but also of Starters has undergone a make-over for the worst. The model (or models) look like they were on Quaaludes or something. The models look like different people, and neither cover looks as good as the original Starters cover. The new covers SUCK (I show the Enders cover here which matches the original Starters cover in my earlier review). This is what happens when you let Big Publishing™ get its massive and clumsy foot in the door! Yes, the sequel is published by Ember and that's pretty much what this novel is - a dying ember after the roaring fire of volume 1.
In passing, I have to say I was not at all impressed with Lissa Price's website. Her 'About' page seems to be about nothing save making money! It quite literally tells nothing about Lissa Price except how seemingly obsessed she is with formalities and opportunities. I was quite turned-off her by reading that. Her first novel was really good, but its sequel is so appallingly amateurish as to be scary. What the hell happened? Where was her literary agent? Did they not read this and advise her against going ahead with it as it was? Where was her book editor? Did they not warn her that this novel was nowhere near ready for prime-time?
This novel begins with Callie living in the mansion vacated by Helena, her psychotic abuser from the first volume. Helena died in that story and left the mansion to Callie and to her own granddaughter, Emma. Callie was supposed to locate Emma, but she simply blows off that commitment. She still has the chip in her head which allowed people to control her body remotely, but it has been modded by a guy (Redmond) who at first she felt angry towards, but who subsequently became her friend. The chip was how she planned upon earning money to pay for her kid brother getting treatment for his medical problems. Her entire life revolved around her kid brother in volume one. He may as well not even exist in volume two!
In order to explain why this novel is so god-awful, this rest of this review is going to have some MAJOR SPOILERS, even by my standards, so do not read any further unless you want these spoilers in your head! Note that some of this is so bad that even as I try to explain it, I fear you may not follow the explanation.
The "Old Man" who had been responsible for running the organization to which Callie volunteered her youth for rent, is still free, and he's able to contact her via her chip - and to later start controlling her through it even when she was unwilling and quite conscious. He wants her chip mods for himself and is willing to kill to get it, as she discovers at the mall when he blows up that chip-carrying girl remotely, using the chip itself. How exactly a tiny chip can be made to explode with sufficient force to take out a small portion of a mall and kill people is conveniently glossed over, and Price agrees with me on that, based on what happens later to Emma, but apparently she forgot the earlier massive destructive power of her magic chip. This was the first thing I disliked about this novel, and this particular incident makes no sense in light of what happens later in the novel between Callie and Hyden.
Another problem was that everyone seems to have suddenly become scientifically stupid in Price's world - especially the scientists. They’ve all apparently forgotten something we knew back in 1836, when Michael Faraday discovered that (with few exceptions) an electromagnetic signal cannot pass into a properly protected enclosed area - hence the name Faraday cage. This is presumably where that tinfoil hat trope came from. Callie can be cut off from the unwelcome invading signals even if the chip cannot be removed. The chip could also be fried with an EMP. Price is evidently a "graduate" of the University of Iowa's summer writing workshop which may account for her apparent lack of a decent science education.
The story wasn't too bad in its early stages, but even then there were issues. As I mentioned, Callie is in a mall when she sees the head of a fellow Starter - someone she knows - explode. Her chip was detonated remotely as a demonstration by the "Old Man" of his power. The Old Man was the CEO of the corporation which abused Starters in the first novel, and which Callie brought to its knees. She's then kidnapped by Hyden, who lies that he's the son of "Old Man", and he claims that he wants to bring him down. The truth is that Hyden is the Old Man: he was apparently wearing an improbably effective disguise in the first novel! Yeah. Right.
Callie inexplicably falls immediately in love with Hyden, and he and she start kidnapping other Starters who have been chipped (and subsequently referred to as "metals"). They bring them to Hyden's lab. Hyden tells Callie he has secured her boyfriend Michael from the first novel, and her kid brother Tyler, at a safe location and Callie has no issue with this at all, although why they're not secured with Callie is blown off. Hyden lies that he wants to bring his old man (i.e. himself) down, when his real plan is to use her to capture all the "metals" and sell them off as slaves to the highest bidder. He consistently lies to Callie until he's forced to tell her the truth, and she pretty much immediately forgives him, even for the raid he conducted on his own lab to kidnap and transport the "metals" to a secret desert lab to auction them off, a raid during which Redmond is murdered. Hyden consistently lies to Callie that he doesn't know where this lab is and he leads her to believe her father is dead even though he's holding her father captive at that secret lab!
Callie inexplicably forgives Hyden for every evil act he has set in motion and romps off holding his hand at the end of the novel joyfully planning on working for the government organization which also kidnaps and abuses Callie! Her dearest lifelong friend and boyfriend from the first novel is completely sidelined here for Hyden. Her son, about whom her life revolved is completely sidelined here for Hyden. Callie is yet another main female character in a dystopian novel written by a female author who is consistently shown to be slow, boneheaded, stupid, incompetent, moronic, and a willing pawn of men.
In short, this novel was lousy, and a really poor excuse for a sequel to an original novel that was so entertaining. I rate this novel a truly warty read.
