Title: Starters
Author: Lissa Price
Publisher: Delacorte makes it all but impossible to find their website, so go fish!
Rating: worthy!
What can I say about Starters?! Nothing yet! It's early days (or early pages!) so there's still plenty of time for it to go to hell in a hand-basket, but I am very excited about it so far. It’s well-written and refreshingly new, although it definitely has roots in other stories of a similar nature, such as The Surrogates, and Dollhouse. There's a sequel coming (Enders), and there are some mini in-between stories, too.
There's a "book trailer" for it! I have no idea what the point of these books trailers is supposed to be. Seriously. This is not a movie. It's highly unlikely that the characters in this trailer will ever be in any movie made about this book. The lead looks nothing whatsoever like Callie as pictured on the book cover - and yes, I know that's a sketch and not a photo, but it's far more a likeness of Callie than is the actor in the trailer! Why didn't they get the same girl to sit for that? Neither the girl in the trailer nor the boy who plays her brother look even remotely hungry, let alone like they've been living on the street for some considerable time. Were the producers deliberately trying to mislead the public about what they would read? Books are not movies, you publishers. Deal with it. Embrace it. Vivent la différence!
Okay, I'm all better now! The protagonist is Callie (I'm not sure about that name, but what the heck, let’s go with it!), a sixteen-year-old girl who is homeless and orphaned. All she has in the world is her younger brother Tyler, who is sick, and her good friend Michael. And she has a dear hope. In Callie's world, a war has been fought and the devastation made horrific by the release of a 'spore' bomb, which apparently killed off millions. The weird thing is that it killed only the 'Middlers' - that is, people between the ages of 20 and 60. Starters are the young, like Callie. For some reason they were immune to the spores. The Enders are the very old - and in this future, the Enders live until they’re well into their hundreds - some even to two hundred. They were not affected by the spores, either, again for reasons unexplained - unless there was some vaccination going on: as usual for the young and the old, and the middle never got it, but again, if that's the case, there's no explanation for why it wasn't administered. It's not like they didn't know what was coming.
This all seems a bit artificial to me, but it contributes to the urgency of the story. There's also another division: there are the rich, and there are the poor (how that happened is equally mysterious), and the poor either avoid the marshals and squat in whichever derelict building they can find - and from which they're periodically (and quite literally) smoked out, or they get captured and effectively turned into child-labor slaves.
The only alternative is the one which Callie is effectively forced into pursuing: she can rent her body to the Enders. This is illegal, but it's done clandestinely and is hugely successful and very lucrative. If she does only three rentals, she'll earn enough money to rent an apartment for a couple of years at least, and get herself, her brother, and even Michael off the streets. The body rental isn't quite what you might think: it’s not a sexual thing. There is a technology which can allow the Enders to take over the body - like in The Surrogates except that they're taking over a real body, not a robotic one. The rental can last for a day, a week, a month. Those are the three to which Callie is subject, but the third one lasts only for a week before Callie wakes up to discover that she's still in rental mode, and not back at the facility waking up to receive her reward.
Something has gone wrong and Callie realizes how dramatically wrong it is when she hears a voice inside her head which tells her not to go back to the Prime Destinations facility which orchestrates these rentals. Clearly someone on the inside has gone to bat for her. Instead, Callie takes over her renter's life - in a rich mansion with a servant! - and she starts to see the young man she met at the club where she recovered her consciousness while trying to figure out what to do about her new circumstances. Unfortunately, her renter isn't done with her, and she blacks out for eighteen hours - apparently when Helena, the 125-year-old woman who is renting her, takes back control!
Over the next couple of days, Callie realizes that Helena is planning on shooting someone - someone she blames for the death of her granddaughter Emma. Emma evidently rented her own body for no reason other than to get the free make-over which comes with renting. Unfortunately, Emma died and this is why Helena wants revenge, and why she's willing to sacrifice Callie's body to achieve it! This plot point with Emma's motives seemed a bit weak to me, but I'm enjoying this enough right now to be willing to let Lissa Price pull the wool over my eyes just a bit. Plus I love the name 'Lissa'!
Well, after all that, I briefly had the horrible feeling that Price was betraying me, getting me all excited and thrilled with this read, and then letting me down in the middle, but she picked it up and got through it without failing; then she upped the ante! This is the way to write a novel!
So Callie arranges to stay the night with her new acquaintance, Madison, a century-old gamer. Blake calls her and invites her to the very speech which Helena was supposed to use as her venue to assassinate Blake's grandfather, the senator. Naturally, Callie refuses to go, which is why she's hiding out with Madison, but then she changes her mind and goes. When she gets there, Helena tunes in to her again and tells her there's a gun hidden in the rest room. Callie at first refuses to go get it, but Helena claims that she has to because it has her fingerprints on it.
This is where I felt let down because I'm thinking, "So what?" So what if it has her fingerprints on it? No one has her fingerprints on record! She could leave the gun alone, where it would remain undiscovered for some time, but she doesn’t. This was foolish on Callie's part, because at any time Helena could have reclaimed her body and killed the senator, but as it happens, that didn't.
The second problem was that I thought we were going to start sliding into Le Stupide, but fortunately, we didn’t slip too far. The problem with meeting the senator, which Callie never once considered, is that when she initially went to see him, she was ejected from his office because she had been there before (under Helena's control) and caused trouble). This is a problem because now Callie's appearance is known to the senator's staff and his security, so showing up wanting to meet him at the function is foolish, but this is completely glossed over in favor of something else; the senator recognizes her as a renter! Callie is helped by other renter acquaintances to escape from the function.
She returns to Madison's place and sees the senator make an announcement on the TV: he's going to revoke the 'minor's can’t work' policy (why that policy was in place and how it’s being violated routinely by the work details is not addressed!) so they can work for various corporations. The leader amongst these is Prime Destinations, of course. On a secret side channel to which Madison subscribes, Prime Destinations makes a parallel announcement to its premium subscribers: they will be able to permanently rent/buy minors and thereby start their lives over! The leader of Prime Destinations: a very shadowy figure whose appearance and voice are both disguised, explains a few details, which thoroughly disgusts both Callie and Helena, but Helena is evidently killed since she starts failing in her communications with Callie and her last words are for Callie to run!
Callie tracks down the guy who (at Helena's instigation) did the mods to her brain chip. He can’t remove the chip but he can glue a small plate to her head to block it which should be good for about a week. Having done this, Callie takes off, avoiding a chasing SUV, and contacts Blake. When they meet, she tells him everything, and he invites her to the family ranch so they can try to dissuade the senator from going ahead with this horrible plan.
So now I find that I'm wondering if the Prime Destinations leader is actually Blake himself! But you know how lousy I am at figuring these things out, so I'll be amazed if this idea turns out to be the right one. Callie runs into Michael on the street and discovers that he has rented himself leaving her brother Tyler in the care of Florina, Michael's would-be girlfriend. That's completely irresponsible of him. I'm guessing he's going to be killed off to leave the playing field clear for Blake. Callie has arranged for Tyler and Florina to stay in a hotel for a few days, but then she learns that some Ender has picked them up - to use them to blackmail her presumably.
I also have to wonder how this 'permanency' plan is gong to work! The story is told as though there are endless orphans to be had, but clearly there are not. There was only a fixed number to begin with, and that number cannot grow significantly. Remember there are no 'Middlers' - none of the people who normally have a family. The only people who are likely to be family starters are the starters, and they're not breeding. On the contrary - they're being rounded up and put into hard jobs where life expectancy isn’t that great. The ones who aren't rounded up have an even shorter life expectancy.
Having whined about that, I'm still on board with this story which remains intriguing and engrossing. Callie visits the senator's ranch and takes him at gunpoint, hoping to meet the shadowy and reclusive dude in charge of Prime Destinations, but the senator deliberately crashes the car and escapes. Now Callie is a fugitive, accused of attempted assassination; however, instead of being arrested for that, she's captured as a loose minor and sent to a prison!
But it all works out in the end. And there's a sequel! I'm Ian Wood and I recommned this novel!
