Title: Under the Never Sky
Author: Veronica Rossi
Publisher: Harper Teen
Rating: WARTY! (to the max)
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This novel is part of the inevitable trilogy, of which two are already published, the sequel being Through the Ever Night. Whether I'll read that remains to be seen, but it's not looking great at the moment!
I can see myself wading through this novel if it doesn't sink hopelessly into Le Stupide, but it's laden with YA trope. Forget the book's cover, which features the sturdy, confident young girl striding purposefully through the wilds. That's pure, unadulterated blast-ended skrewt! And what's with that chic outfit she's wearing? It portrays nothing which even remotely resembles anything Aria wears in the novel. This is why you need to design your own cover!
Aria, (yeah, you heard me) is a weakling, living in pampered splendor, safe under a dome, enjoying virtual worlds up the wazoo, completely useless, helpless, and completely hopeless if she were ever to be stranded on the outside. Which of course she is, and let's not forget, unjustly so! So we have 'how wronged thou art' already in play. The inevitable rough-edged, wild guy (with the rather farcical name of Peregrine - Gale and Peeta, anyone?) is the tough, strong, wise, and masterful hero, who is street savvy (or in this case badlands savvy) and will sweep her off her feet. Barf.
Peeta - sorry, Perry - is on the outs with his clan because they're all macho types, and his own brother will likely kill him because, of course, there can be only one Blood Lord! Yes, you heard that right! It's always a Lord innit? never a Duke or a Baron. Plus, he loses his brother's young son (who's dying anyway) so he's doubtlessly going to be wandering the wilds trying to find the kid and he'll inevitably run into her rear, er Aria, and the two will be forced to team up because she can't survive alone in the badlands being a poor weak fair game, er sex, an' all, and he desperately needs her, because the kidnapped kid will undoubtedly be taken to the city where Aria will have to help him break in an get him back. (Note, all of that came true! Maybe my prognostication power is on the up and up after being exposed to all this urethra...er aether?)
So I guess I need to say a word about why Aria got tossed out on her, ah rear. She's the standard YA trope no parents cliché. Her father isn't even mentioned (not that I recall, but I may have blanked it out), and her mom is AWOL. Aria has the idea that one of the guys she knows in Le Dome might have some inside info on her mother's whereabouts or status, which is why she joins him on his illegal stunt which gets out of control, and for which she turns out to be the fall gal.
The dome is nothing but a huge rip-off of Logan's Run where people spend their whole time in Les Realms indulging themselves hedonistically. The Realms is just a whole bunch of virtual environments. Rossi doesn't explain how it is that these people avoid bedsores when spending all their live-long day on their asses immersed in playing what really amounts to extravagant video games with some sensory enhancements (which are totally unexplained). Nor do we learn who or what it is which powers and maintains all these free services; maybe it's magical pixies?
In order to play these games, and indeed to participate in this society, each person has an electronic monacle slapped on their face. Aria's stops working when she's outside, and once Perry tracks her down using his enhanced sense of smell, he decides that he needs to take her over the mountains and far away in order to get the monacle fixed by some buddy of his so that Aria can use it to contact her mother, so that her mother can clue them in on the latest updates regarding Talon, so that Perry can claw him out of the clutches of the Turkeys who kidnapped him. There's been no word whatsoever on why they kidnapped a seven-year-old terminally ill kid. It makes no sense whatsoever, but I'm betting Talon comes out of there cured (I got that one right, too!). Maybe they took him to lure the local outsiders into a trap, but if that's the case, then they wasted their time because Talon's dad has now abandoned his son! Only Perry-A (Peregrine and Aria) are concerned about retrieving him.
So after he saves she from an aether storm, Perry-A become an item and start their road trip together where they inevitably bond and instadore abounds. Yeah, about those aether storms! There's no word on where they came from or how they began, but they appear to be some sort of violent electromagnetic energy discharge coming down from what appears to be aurora-like activity in the atmosphere. They're a bit like lightning mated with a tornado, laying waste to swathes of land and burning people quite literally to a crisp.
Aria proves to be the most whiny-assed woman in the entire universe, but eventually she starts to suck it up. Given what Rossi does to her feet, her whining is entirely understandable, but the really weird thing is that she whines about literally everything but her feet, which is utterly unbelievable. Rossi basically has Aria's feet shredded, pierced and blistered, raw and bleeding like a little female Messiah hiking to Calvary all in the space of a few days, yet at no point do they ever hurt so badly that Aria can’t walk, which I found to be equally unbelievable. Clearly Rossi has never walked very far in difficult conditions, and if she thinks wearing high heels to the office for a day counts, then she's delusional.
Some reviews I've read make a big deal out of Aria's disobedience of Perry when he tells her to stay in the cave and she wanders off to pick berries (which - and here's the only place where this novel is like The Hunger Games - turn out to be poisonous!) But that's not the issue; the issue is that while she's out, three members of the Croven tribe come calling. They're ensconced in the cave when she returns. So here is the challenge to all those who've criticized Aria's conduct in this one scene: how, exactly would matters have been improved - or even changed - had Aria remained inside the cave? The answer is: no way no how! The truly absurd behavior here isn't Aria's but Perry's inanely macho showmanship.
The Croven take Aria captive so subtley that she doesn't realize what they're doing. She thinks they're friendly. Perry arrives and promptly dispatches all three of them. He explains this away by telling Aria that they're cannibals and they were going to eat her, but he never for a second tried to negotiate with them - for example, telling them that she's under his tribe's protection, and that if they harm her there will be war. He simply puts arrows into two of them and he decapitates a third - with a knife, shades of Middle East terrorism.
This may not seem important, but it turns out to be so because as soon as he's done that, he's in a near panic: now the rest of the Croven people will come down on him like a ton of bricks for killing their people (or so he whines). If that's so, then why didn't he try to negotiate? His actions made no sense as precipitous as they were except for Rossi's need to portray him as a brutal savage, which she will then have to undo to make him acceptable to Aria! Lol!
So now despite Aria's poor feet, they have to pick up the pace, and they detect the Croven following them in numbers, yet there is no explanation whatsoever for how that tribe got onto them so rapidly. Equally lacking and much more glaring is any explanation as to why this tribe of cannibals is operating so very far from any source of food! Shouldn't they be near a village instead of out in the wilds, miles from anyone?
Perry whines pretty near as much as Aria does. His latest spaz is about the pine forest spoiling his ability to scent-track their pursuers, although there's no explanation offered as to why pine forests do this, but no other smell has the same overwhelming effect on him, so the reader can only conclude that this was made up on the spot to add more drama to this Simpson-style low-speed pursuit through the pine forest, up hill and down dale.
Perry-A run into an old friend of Perry's called Roar (yep) who is as good at hearing as Perry is at smelling. He joins them and through him, Aria learns of Perry's ability to detect emotions through smelling. Yeah, right. The weird thing is that Aria totally freaks out about this. Shoot two guys with arrows, decapitate a third without even an overture, and she’ll bitch about it, but it’s really no big deal. Smell her feelings OTOH, and she goes completely ballistic about it. Really? That took me right out of suspension of disbelief.
They also find a 13-year-old kid tagging along, called Cinder (for good reason!) who is described as almost skeletal, yet when he gets sick and has to be carried as they escape the Croven, he's described as weighing a hundred pounds?! Honestly? Does Rossi not understand the relative weight of things? A five foot tall 13 year old would be at a healthy weight at 100 pounds. Rossi doesn’t describe how tall Cinder is, but he doesn't appear to be very imposing from the narrative, and his growth is likely to have been stunted from his life-style, so her estimate of a hundred pounds is way, way out IMO. Cinder is an orphan, and my guess is that he crisped his parents accidentally.
Anyway, after a confrontation with Perry, Cinder somehow manages to channel the aether and zap Perry's hand, turning it black and blistered! Nonetheless, they take him along with them as they flee the Croven, since his discharge appears to have left him very weak. They finally make it to the city where they've been headed all this time. It’s absurdly high tech, with a hospital facility, which of course treats Perry-A, bringing about a miraculous recovery in both cases, no doubt. But what's with the qualified medical professional handing the care of Perry's badly burned hand to Aria? That was nothing but juvenile romance pap. Rossi needs to go work a few volunteer shifts in a real hospital burn unit.
Cinder goes on the lam, heading out of the city despite the fact that the Croven have started staking it out and firing random arrows over the wall. And with these potentially deadly arrows coming in, what do the bubbly and vivacious Perry-A do? The go up on top of the 70 foot tower and sit right on the edge dangling their legs over, and making prime targets of themselves for Croven arrows! Morons. And what are the Croven eating during this time? What are they drinking? Perry and Roar combined were having a tough time finding food for just four of them. There are some sixty Croven out there. Are they fasting?! Are they eating each other? If they are, then what's the problem? Just hang out a while longer and most of them will have been eaten! lol! Other than offering a poor excuse for a pseudo-threat, I see no reason for this fake threat of the Croven.
Finally they get Aria's monacle up and running (what was with the countdown timer on that? Seriously?! How was it even possible to know to the exact second when they would break the protection? lol!). There had been two video files downloaded onto her monacle. One of these was the video she had taken during the incident which resulted in her being thrown out of the thunder dome. This is the proof she's been seeking in order to show that it was Soren, not her, who was ultimately responsible.
The other video was the one from her mom which she had really been wanting to see, and which essentially told her very little except that all the spoiled-brat-living in Le Realms had resulted in atrophy of the indwellers' limbic system because they weren't 'really experiencing it' out in the wild. Seriously? Rossi really lost it with this one. The fact is, even within Rossi's own framework, that these people were being subject to The Realms which were physically safe, but which still excited the limbic system with spills and thrills. So where did the atrophy come from? Nowhere!
It's nonsense; nothing more, apparently, than a misguided attempt to try and sell us on the ill-considered presumption that living in the wild is better for us than having decent food, quality medicine, and access to endless information and entertainment. Yeah. Right! Someone has evidently forgotten that stress is a killer. So now I'm curious as to why Rossi is selling this novel as an ebook! Isn’t that rather hypocritical? Shouldn't she ought to be writing out each copy by hand on animal skins and hawking them from a stall at the local street market?
Apparently the Dwellers were testing out their theories about this bullshit limbic collapse on people taken from the wild, so now we understand why Talon was abducted. Perry exhibits the most childish reaction to this with a fine performance art tantrum, for which the judges gave him a 9.5, and Aria learns that she is half wild (but we’re not told which area of Aria is wild and which is tame)! Her absentee father was one of the outdwellers, not an indweller like her mother. Wouldn’t it be a riot if Aria turned out to be Perry's step-sister? lol! But her absentee mother, after telling her all this distressing news, including the fact that the indwellers in her dome (Bliss) have lost it and turned overnight into psycho zombies, suddenly clams up and tells Aria no more! Deliberately keeping her child in the dark, she explains away this insane deprivation by claiming, "What I haven't shared is for your own protection, and it's always better, isn’t it, when you discover answers on your own."? I was expecting a Muah-ha-ha after that, rather like the laughter in the Austin Powers movies, but I didn’t see one.
So Veronica Rossi, are you kidding me? What does Lumina (Aria's atrociously misnamed mother, who illuminates nothing!) even mean? She's not telling her daughter what she needs to know for her own protection but she wants her to find out for herself so she'll be what - unprotected then?! So she'll be smarter when she dies horribly because she learns what she desperately needs to know too late?! I can’t get my mind around that one at all. What kind of deranged, abusive parent would keep their children blind, potentially risking their health or even their life? Rossi has two sons of her own and should know better; unless, of course, she wants us to understand that Aria's mother is a no-good, absentee, uncaring parent (don't worry, Lumina gets hers). After all, Aria's mother did abandon Aria to go to a different dome when there was absolutely no reason whatsoever for her not to take her daughter with her. Why did she even go in the first place? Could she not have learned the very same things in Aria's homedome of Reverie that she has learned in Bliss? None of this makes any sense except as a poor excuse for plotting.
Another weird thing here is that since Aria can't get into Revererie via the monacle, Perry has to wear it, and he's such a cry-baby about it. But here is the problem: Perry can't get in either, we're told, all he can do is access The Realms. I have no idea what that's supposed to mean! Does it mean any old stranger can access the Dome realms?! Does it mean that all of these environments are stored somehow in the monacle and he can play in those? If that's the case, then how does he get into the part where he meets Talon? He's able to contact Talon and talk and interact with him. How is he doing that if he has no access to Reverie? All of this is glossed over. But Perry learns that not only is Talon there, Clara and his own brother are also there. They've been captured! He also learns that Talon is doing so well that he doesn't even want to leave Reverie! lol! But that's not going to stop the heroic Perry from dragging him, kicking and screaming, out of there to his certain death on the outside. What a man! What a paragon of puerile practicality.
I'm having a hard time liking this novel (did oyu guess?). I'm having a hard time even in making sense of it at times. But onwards and upwards (or as the RAF says, per ardua ad astra, which means that commercials made by asses are really hard to stomach). So Aria decides she needs to learn how to defend herself, and Perry, who has quite literally just declared to himself that he will stay away from her, immediately jumps at the chance to engage in the tired trope of being in intimate contact while showing her how to handle this rather virile bow and its phallic arrows. I wonder if Rossi watched Avatar before writing this scene?
The sad thing is that after all this, after pushing Aria forward as a strong heroic figure, Rossi is slowly reduced to teenage T&A. Perry declares (but not in so many words) that our heroine is just a weak woman and can’t handle a manly bow such as Perry's, so Roar gets to teach her to knife-fight instead. Right, 'cos a small, relatively light indweller woman will have far greater success in a close-quarters knife fight with a strong, wiry, outdweller guy than she would shooting him with a bow before he can even get close to her, and there is no way in hell that Perry, surrounded by a forest, could ever make a suitable bow for her.
So as heir to the captured Bluhd Lawd, Perry's duty is clear: he ought to get back to his village ASAP and take charge, but in this he fails comprehensively. Instead, this irresponsible jerk resolves to stay with Aria and go joy-riding off to Bliss. So while they're waiting for a convenient aether storm to show up, so they can slip away in the dark, unseen by the Croven, they play at knife-fighting, and Aria gets her groove on with Perry.
The night they finally decide to leave is a complete and utter disaster. They incur multiple casualties and make no plans whatsoever to return immediately to the village to regroup and recuperate. They're confronted by huge numbers of Croven, and at the last minute, they're predictably saved by Cinder dispatching all of the Croven with his super-duper lightning storm, leaving Perry and Aria to continue their inane quest alone. As soon as they get on the road again - master hunter Perry completely neglecting to restock on arrows - they're forced to take to the trees, scurrying into a conveniently waiting tree-house to hide from those vicious brute beasts! Rossi has the wolves barking, even, but at least they don't have quills! Yes, Cheree Smith, I'm looking at you! Oh, wolves can bark, but it's very rare, especially when they're running down prey. So how do Perry-A get out of this one? Well, (and I am not making this up) Aria effectively sings to the wolves and they leave! lolol! I kid you not. Talk about deus ex machina, although this is more like clueless ex crement.
So after telling Aria that trees are smart enough to know when the weather is going to change, and showing her his, she shows him hers, and suddenly...it's the next morning, and they're off again on their Bliss-ful quest. Fortunately Aria didn't smell fertile, so she won't become preggers. I'll bet that's what every boy tells his girlfriend in Perry-A world...! Aria learns that it's "...the loveliest thing to be kissed for no reason, even while chewing food." and soon, they're regurgitating food to feed each other (actually I made that very last bit up, but ew!). Later, Aria slaughters a badger - while it's still underground! And here I thought they didn't need no stinking badgers!
Yep, Aria is evolving into supergirl, and all it took was her getting laid. I'm on a strict regimen of IV Compazine now, to enable me to get through these last few pages. Despite it being a six-day hike to Bliss, they get there in no time at all, no doubt borne magically on the carpet of lurv they've woven together. Bliss sneaks in there and finds her dead mother and is promptly cpatured by the Dwellers, and confonted by Soren;s dad, who conveiently happenes ot be at Bliss. he offers her a deal - find out how if there really is an aether-free place on the planet, or kiss Talon goodbye. Of course, Aria accepts this offer iwht alacrity, and toddles off into volume two.
Never in the field of human fiction has so much sucked so much with so few breaks. This novel stunk. It ought to be refiled Under the Never Stomach It. And that's it.
