Title:
Independent Study
Author:
Joelle Charbonneau
Publisher:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Rating:
WARTY!
So after reviewing seven Net Galley novels in a row, it's time to move on to some other stuff!
This is the sequel to The Testing, The Hunger Games rip-off trilogy. Malencia Vale tells this in first person present PoV unfortunately. I guess the majority of YA writers these days simply have no idea how to write dystopian fiction in the third person. I wonder why that is? There's nothing more irking than a novel which is all me me me! Look how important I am! The world would end with out ME! Read all about me! It's the All Me, All The Time Channel!!!
That aside, who would name their heroic character with a prefix that's the French word for bad? I can see a Valencia evoking oranges: positive, bright, sweet, tangy, full of goodness, but to name her with a negative prefix just boggles the mind.
The book cover says, "Failure is not an option"! Seriously? Which genius at HMH came up with that breath-takingly original stroke of eloquence? The cover also says, "Your time is almost up", but I'll bet dollars to dung that the time won't even be close to "up" before the third volume gets published! I know writers don't have squat to do with their covers unless they self-publish but honestly?
I read the first of this sad series as a galley and it was derivative and uninventive, but not completely and nauseatingly awful. What persuaded me to give the sequel a chance was that at the end of the first volume, each candidate's memory was wiped, meaning that volume two would be a bit of a do-over. I was intrigued by this, notwithstanding the risk and stupidity in wiping the mind of someone who has proven her- or him-self to be the best of the best. I decided to give the sequel a shot. I was not impressed, but at least Charbnonneau knows to use the phrase "set foot" in place of "step foot"! Now if only she could grasp that it's "biceps" and not "bicep", my opinion of her writing might improve moderately!
The weak thing about his novel (other than its main character) is that it's all black and white. Either you succeed admirably or you're eliminated with extreme prejudice. I can't see any society getting anywhere with a policy like that. I cannot even see a society ending-up like that, not even after a disastrous world war and (un)natural catastrophes, although that kind of 'final judgment' is a very religious approach to life, and the USA is one of the most dangerously fundamentalist nations on the planet. Where is the logic in a society which purposefully kills its most promising offspring? It makes no sense at all, especially not with the population all-but annihilated to begin with.
So Mal-encia Vale is yet another of these YA female main characters who is offered to us as a hero by an author who then quietly undermines her character at every turn. She's female and in the minority at the university (no explanation is offered for why men in general are evidently smarter than women in general in this world). We're apparently expected to believe that this equals "weak". She's short of stature, so we're also expected to believe that this equals "disadvantaged". In short (forgive the pun) she's just another Beatrice Prior, which is what's truly sad.
She certainly ain't no Katniss Everdeen because she's really Mary Sue Vale - she can do no wrong, and she's always on top, always the best, always winning. She has no flaws, which ironically makes her seriously flawed as a character. She's supposed to be the strong female, but she's portrayed as being almost completely dependent upon men - men like her boyfriend Tomas, her secret adviser Michal, and so on. Whenever she has a "brilliant idea" it's inevitably based on something she remembers her father or one of her brothers saying or doing, never her mother. She's supposed to be super-smart, and yet she does one dumb thing after another, and she has no original ideas. In short, she's truly pathetic.
This novel starts out with this 'hero' planning on running away, but ending-up taking the advice of a man, and staying. She did not reason this out for herself. There goes her smarts! It's sad to say the least. Some have praised this novel for making the lead female cerebral and using math and science, but there really isn't any part of the novel where she does that. In the first set of tests where they go on this childish scavenger-hunt complete with cheesy poem-clues, she contributes nothing. In fact, in one case, while the boys work out the solution, Mal-encia is trapped in a box!
As if that isn't bad enough, Mal-encia has consistently mal-icious thoughts about, or impressions of, all other females in this novel. There isn't another decent woman anywhere to be found who can match her for how wonderfully sweet and winning she is: all the other women are portrayed negatively. That's not only completely unrealistic, it's quite simply bizarre coming from a female author and is a give-away sign of bad writing technique: the fact that that she evidently feels she has to trash all other female characters in order to make her main character look good!
If you thought the testing had stopped after The Testing (how original a title is that?!), you were wrong. It never stops, which seemed to me to be completely ridiculous. After her selection exam, Mal-encia, who wants to be a mechanical engineer, is dumped into the government program instead - one of the five factions available. Failure to succeed in a faction means dismissal. Does that sound familiar to readers of the execrable Divergent series, where faction drop-outs become factionless and have to fend for themselves? This novel, believe it or not, even has a chasm at one point, with a railing, which looks down on a river far below!
There is a host of other oddities, too. The head professor of government studies, Verna Holt comes to get Mal-encia from her dorm room on her first day! This seemed absurd to me. Seriously - the senior professor comes to each dorm room to pick up the freshmen? Maybe it's symbolic of something, because everything in this novel has a symbol: the boy's dorm is marked with a coiled spring (what's that all about?!), the girl's dorm is marked with a key (ditto!). Mal-encia herself is represented with a lightning bolt. Yeay for her. What a pity she isn't anywhere near that bright.
Each of the five factions have their symbols, too, which appear on the book's cover, because you know that it's currently illegal in the USA to publish a dystopian trilogy with a female first person main character without having some sort of circular symbol on the cover, right? People have been redirected for far less! At one point, the author writes, "Weather and animals have eaten away pieces of the dark gray walls" Really? Animals have eaten the walls? I felt like climbing the walls after reading that bizarre assertion. Are the these buildings really just grass huts?!
That's not all. Michal Gallen from volume one, the guy who keeps Mal-encia from her cowardly, knees-bent running away behavior, informs her that he will no longer be close enough to her to continue helping her. He tells her that there will be someone else, yet he fails to tell her who this is! This was about where I would have tossed the book into the paper shredder had it not been a library book. This is so moronic that it's almost unbelievable that a writer could be this bad, and that her editor could be this blind to how poor this writing is. I mean this wasn't even a plot device, it was cheap amateur theatrics and there was no reason whatsoever for it other than to struggle to artificially ramp-up some much-needed tension.
We're given some pretty ham-fisted reasons to believe that Mal-encia's new contact is Ian, a senior who is her new adviser in the government dorm (yes, just like in Divergent, the initiates have to give up their families and even their intake dorm room, and move into their new faction's 'compound'. I'm guessing that Ian is a big, fat, scaly, slippery red herring, and that the "dark-skinned girl" who seems peeved by Ian's dicking around with the intern assignments, is the one who is actually her contact, but I could be wrong.
Even after the assignment exam - the results of which determine the faction to which they will be assigned, the testing continues. They're shown to their rooms and told that they must not be late for lunch, and then the power goes out and they're expected to break out of their rooms to get downstairs for lunch. Absurd. The only thing that's notable about this is that Mal-encia fails to offer any assistance to those who are still locked in their dorm rooms. Some leader. Some hero.
The university is located in Tosu City (it may as well be named Tosser City), and the students who hail from there did not have to go through the appalling "Testing" in volume one, which the students from the 'provinces' did. This is pretty much a mirror image of the Hunger games where tributes from districts one and two were privileged by being trained from birth to fight in the games and so had the advantage, but it makes no sense here: in another piece of bad writing, no reason is given as to why the Tosu City students get a bye.
That the asinine testing continues even after the students have been through their qualifying exam and assigned to their appropriate faction is not only indicative of a lack of ideas from the author, it's open proof that this system (within this world) is flawed, yet no one remarks upon this at all. They all blindly accept it, including mega-brain Mal-encia.
Charbonneau evidently knows squat about biology. At one point, during a field test, she has a small party (led, of course, by Mal-encia) enter what used to be a zoo. There's a large snake (12 feet long) still living there, and she tries to distract it by throwing a lump of wood: the snake snaps its head around. This is after she mentions that some snakes are deaf. Technically they aren't: they hear through their jaw bones (actually in the same way we do, except that over the course of evolution, the reptile jaw mutated into our inner ear bones. So if the wood had hit the floor and the snake's head was on the floor, it would have detected it. But the snake's head is suspended in the air - it wouldn't hear a thing.
Charbonneau not only has a poor grasp of evolution, she also doesn't quite get the idea of survival. At one point, we're expected to believe that water which is "murky brown" is contaminated but probably drinkable??? She doesn't know physics, either, evidently. A stone thrown horizontally will hit the ground at the same time as one dropped straight down if both are released from the same height and at the starting same time and starting point. So in solving one of these scavenger-hunt clues, the horizontal velocity is irrelevant for the first part of the question.
The biggest problem, however, is that this entire challenge is bullshit. The clues are childish and the rules clear - although leader Mal-encia herself tries a bluff at one point, threatening to leave her team behind and they fall for it, yet it was already explained that the team ideally needs to finish together. And these are supposed to be smart people?
The illogicalities continued to mount disturbingly as this story dragged on. Mal-encia is given nine classes (50% more than anyone else), yet she believes that she's been set up for failure. When she completes the induction test in record time by defying the book cover blurb (failure is not an option), and realizing that failure is the only option for the final test, she believes professors Holt and Barnes hate her and want her to fail because she's too smart! Never has a book blurb and a book's content been so diametrically opposed! Big Publishing™, epic fail!
Finally, on page 200 or so, Mal-encia actually starts her classes! The classes make no sense to me given the state the world is in and the tragic state of the environment in her own country. We're told that she's studying: global history, advanced calculus, world languages, and United Commonwealth history and law. That last one makes some sense given the profession which has been forced upon her, but given what else has been going down over the last century, I see no point in any of the others. History is irrelevant; what they have to deal with is what's right in front of them - a polluted planet, a devastated nation, where food and shelter are paramount, and reclaiming the environment from the pollution and irradiation is all important.
I can see how these classes might be of some value if the world were normal - similar to the way ours is today, but in their world? No! History? Of what benefit could that be to what she's been assigned to do? Her school is government. Almost none of this is relevant to what she needs to know. Why, for example, is she doing calculus? How will that benefit her, much less be used in government? World languages? This story is so inextricably lodged in the USA that she will never need that! None of this makes any sense! It's like Charbonneau doesn't have sufficient imagination to invent the likely classes that would be necessary to governing a wrecked nation, and instead simply copied some existing contemporary university's curriculum! The next day's classes make even less sense. Electrical and Magnetic Physics? The Rise and fall of Technology? Art, music, literature, bioengineering? Why?
Maybe the overwhelming irrelevancy of everything is why Mal-encia always holding hands like a little kid. This is hardly the hallmark of a born leader! She's so overwhelmed that she frequently regresses to her childhood, and whenever Mary Sue Mal-encia thinks back to her good ol' down-home country upbringing for guidance on what to do next, it's always a male figure to whom she thinks back. Mom doesn't get a look in; only her dad and her brothers are good enough to provide her with useful memories. Way to insult your gender, Charbonneau!
Mal-encia at one point decides she needs to break into the airport - which is supposedly off-limits due to contamination - to find out who is living there. She wonders if it's the "redirected" people or if they're dead. It never once occurs to her that the simplest way to expose Barnes for what he's doing - if indeed he's doing anything (I was never convinced that he was) is to simply ask him for an accounting of all those who failed the testing or were redirected from the university. If they're dead, he will not be able to come-up with convincing evidence of their whereabouts, and he will be done for. If they're not, she can quit obsessing over this, and get on with her life.
Mal-encia is issued a bike! She revels in this and is grateful for the exercise to strengthen her limbs. Then she returns to the government hall and has an apple and some crackers for lunch - that's all! For dinner, she takes some bread and cheese with a bit of fruit. She's a moron. All this bullshit about "strong body, strong mind", and she's eating like an anorexic?
She obsesses over wasted paper, but this is an advanced hi-tech society, Why is an expensive and scarce resource like paper even used at all? Do they have no laptops, no pads? It makes no sense. Clearly Charbonneau did not put anywhere near enough thought into her world-building. Actually it reads more like she put none into it.
One of Mal-encia's projects for President Colander (yes, this whole thing is full of holes) is to help out with the proposed rail link to some of the colonies, but one of the problems with the rail link is the endless large chasms where earthquakes have supposedly rent the Earth asunder! Nowhere does Charbonneau, not in two novels, ever explain exactly how this happened. Why? She doesn't explain because she clearly cannot. It's just this way because it serves her so-called 'plot' for it to be so, and the hell with common sense with science, with logic, or with it fitting into her framework.
I skimmed the last portion of this novel because it was too bad and boring to be worth any more time than that. Charbonneau ought to be paying people to read this crap, not charging us for it. This novel, and this entire series, is WARTY!
