Category: Speculative Fiction
Eve by Anna Carey
(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)
Sixteen years after a deadly virus wiped out most of Earth’s population, the world is a perilous place. Eighteen-year-old Eve has never been beyond the heavily guarded perimeter of her school, but the night before graduation, Eve learns the shocking truth about her school’s real purpose—and the horrifying fate that awaits her.
Fleeing the only home she’s ever known, Eve sets off on a long, treacherous journey, searching for a place she can survive. Along the way she encounters Caleb, a rough, rebellious boy living in the wild. Separated from men her whole life, Eve has been taught to fear them, but Caleb slowly wins her trust…and her heart. He promises to protect her, but when soldiers begin hunting them, Eve must choose between true love and her life.
I started reading Eve after I finished Kushiel’s Dart, which was around two in the morning. I intended just to read up to chapter 10, which would give me a good head start on tomorrow’s reading.
Yeah, right.
Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t stop reading Eve, something that’s extremely unusual in dystopic YA for me. That is how I came to read until four in the morning on Sunday. Staying up late to read on the weekend is not exactly unusual for me, but staying up late to read dystopic YA? That’s new. I have nothing against dystopian YA, but it like if you’ve read one book, you’ve read them all in terms of plot.
True, I could predict most plot twists in Eve. Really, it follows the basic plot arc of all dystopia, not just YA. Yet, somehow, Anna Carey managed to keep me in suspense, flipping pages furiously to find out what happened next. It may seem like a contradiction, but I did predict the basic plot of the story and find it suspenseful at the same time. Why? Because the characters intrigued me.
From the book’s blurb you get the impression that Eve and Caleb are your typical YA couple, but they’re not. Eve has led a very, very sheltered life and she has been conditioned not to trust men. They don’t fall in Insta-Love but you get the feeling that this is a typical first love with all those messy, intense emotions and all of the ups and downs of a rollercoaster.
The world-building is good, but it never crosses into the realm of “Wow! That was amazing!” The way the King of New America rose to power seems plausible, as do the labour camps for orphaned boys, but I would have liked more detail about the plague. What it was, how it started, etc. But that’s probably just me who likes the gory details, so I can’t really complain about that. I suspect it will be covered in more depth in the next two installments of the Eve Trilogy.
I give this book 3.5/5 stars.
Messenger by Lois Lowry
(Cover picture courtesy of Tower Books.)
For the past six years, Matty has lived in Village and flourished under the guidance of Seer, a blind man known for his special sight. Village was once a place that welcomed newcomers, but something sinister has seeped into Village and the people have voted to close it to outsiders. Matty has been invaluable as a messenger. Now he must make one last journey through the treacherous Forest with his only weapon, a power he unexpectedly discovers within himself.
Messenger is another one of those favourite novel study books, or at least it was in my school. After reading The Giver and discovering that the boys in my class (I was the only girl) didn’t completely hate it, our English teacher decided to do a Messenger novel study. True, Messenger is the third book in what used to be a trilogy, but reading the second book, Gathering Blue isn’t necessary for understanding the story. It does enhance your enjoyment, but you won’t be in the dark if you haven’t read it.
Messenger isn’t a bad book, but what annoys me is that there is no explanation for any of the fantastic elements in it like Seer’s ability to See Beyond, Forest’s transformation from good to evil and even Matty’s special power. I like it in books where the author has figured out an explanation for magic, but Lois Lowry never, in any of her books, explains the fantastic elements she includes. I suppose it’s not necessary to have an explanation, but it would be nice.
With that said, to me it seemed like Lois Lowry was guilty of beating-you-over-the-head-with-a-stick-obvious symbolism. Forest, which is friendly toward Matty before the people in Village become selfish, grows ever more hostile, dark and tangled as selfishness takes over. Obviously, Forest symbolizes the growing web of selfishness that is engulfing Village; it’s basically a mirror. Yes, it’s great to include it because you need to analyze literary devices in novel study, but does it have to be so glaringly obvious?
Other than the symbolism that seems ridiculously obvious, Messenger is a pretty good novel. Matty isn’t a great character, but he’s not a bad one either and the plot is interesting enough that we don’t get bored out of our minds. Up until October of this year, Messenger was supposed to be the last ‘Giver’ novel, so we see the protagonists of the first two novels, Jonas and Kira and most plot lines are tied up. I didn’t really like the ending (it wrapped things up a bit too nicely), but it truly was inevitable and there was a lot of foreshadowing throughout the novel that hinted at it.
I give this book 3.5/5 stars.
The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
(Cover picture courtesy of Redditor’s Choice.)
In The Chrysalids John Wyndham takes the reader into the anguished heart of a community where the chances of breeding true are less than 50 per cent and where deviations are rooted out and destroyed as offences and abominations. The narrator of The Chrysalids is David, who can communicate with a small group of other young people by means of ‘thought shapes’. This deviation from a cruelly rigid norm goes unnoticed at first. But sooner or later the secret is bound to be discovered, and the results are violent, horrific…and believable.
The Chrysalids is one of those few high school novel study favourites that actually doesn’t talk down to students. Heaven forbid they read an age appropriate novel that has practical messages about life in it! Well, the reading level is far below what I would consider high school, but it’s definitely a case of content making this a high school book. Incest (between half-cousins), sexuality, torture and death are some of the things students will encounter in The Chrysalids. By grade ten, which is when it is usually taught here in Saskatchewan, I would hope that fifteen and sixteen-year-olds are mature enough to handle such things.
The Chrysalids is a very short novel that covers a fairly large time period and there were times I was confused as to what the heck was going on. However, John Wyndham generally managed to keep the plot on track while developing his characters decently well. David won’t win any prizes for greatest male lead ever, but he’s not a bad character and you really do feel for him and his predicament in Waknuk as a telepath in a society that banishes ‘deviations’ to the Fringes.
My favourite part of The Chrysalids is how John Wyndham constructed the Waknuk society. It’s heavily implied that many centuries ago a nuclear war wiped out the ‘Old People’ (us) and the people of Waknuk are still dealing with the nuclear fallout. How do they deal with it? By turning to a warped version of Christianity and a book called Repentances written during the time of Tribulation (the nuclear war) that reflects the fear of the new radiation-induced deformities. While I won’t get too much into religion, let’s just say that the version of Christianity preached by the community leaders is not the version that I saw when I read the Bible and leave it at that.
The Chrysalids can be enjoyed on many different levels. Some could see it as a crusade against religious fundamentalism and the role of fear in keeping citizens obedient. It could be seen as social commentary on the hypocrisy of people’s fear of anything “Other”, especially when the New Zealand woman calls David’s people ‘primitive’ for not embracing telepathy. It can even been seen as a story of forbidden love between two half-cousins, if you’re so inclined. I’m not, but it can still be interpreted that way.
I give this book 4/5 stars.
Sapphique by Catherine Fisher
(Cover picture courtesy of It’s All About Books.)
Incarceron, the living prison, has lost one of its inmates to the outside world: Finn’s escaped, only to find that Outside is not at all what he expected. Used to the technologically advanced, if violently harsh, conditions of the prison, Finn is now forced to obey the rules of Protocol, which require all people to live without technology. To Finn, Outside is just a prison of another kind, especially when Claudia, the daughter of the prison’s warden, declares Finn the lost heir to the throne. When another claimant emerges, both Finn’s and Claudia’s very lives hang on Finn convincing the Court of something that even he doesn’t fully believe.
Meanwhile, Finn’s oathbrother Keiro and his friend Attia are still trapped inside Incarceron. They are searching for a magical glove, which legend says Sapphique used to escape. To find it, they must battle the prison itself, because Incarceron wants the glove too.
My thought process throughout the novel basically sounded like this: Okay, that’s interesting…Huh?…What’s going on?…That was random…What the heck?…I don’t get it.
It is very rare that I have absolutely no clue what’s going on in a novel, but I admit I had no idea what was going on in Sapphique half of the time. There was no real explanation for why Incarceron turned so evil, how it made those horrible creatures and the humans within it, what happened before Protocol in Claudia’s world, what the warden’s motivations were…there were so many questions that were never answered. I don’t need to have all of the answers, but some of them would be nice so I could understand the novel.
Once again, I couldn’t really connect with the characters. Claudia I sympathized with a bit in the beginning, but was utterly bored by her near the end; Finn was horrible and Attia didn’t have much depth. The only character that managed to interest me in the least was Jared and he wasn’t the greatest character I’ve ever read about. It’s like Verdi’s opera Don Carlo, in which the only remotely sympathetic character dies.
The world of Sapphique and Incarceron had so much potential, but there really was no depth to it. To me, it felt like Catherine Fisher assumed readers knew as much about the world as she did and didn’t bother with any explanations. It’s very frustrating and about halfway through the novel, I was mentally calculating how much time I had left to finish.
I give this book 1.5/5 stars.
FireSeed One by Catherine Stine
(Cover picture courtesy of Catherine Stine’s blog.)
The year is 2089. Temperate climate has replaced Arctic ice, and much of what is now the United States is a lethal Hotzone, cut off by an insurmountable border from its northern, luckier neighbors, Ocean and Land Dominion. It is rumored that roving Hotzone nomads will kill for a water pellet or a slice of insect loaf, and that the ZWC, a dangerous Hotzone activist group, has infiltrated the border to the northern Dominions.
Up in Ocean Dominion, all eighteen year-old Varik Teitur wants is to party on SnowAngel Island with his friend Audun and flirt with college girls he dreams of joining next year in his quest to become a doctor. Instead, he inherits a vast sea farm, following the death of his father, famous marine biologist Professor Teitur. Five weeks later, ZWC member Marisa Baron breaks into the farm’s secret seed vault and a fellow activist poisons the farm’s agar crops, the world’s food source. In order to save the last agar seedlings Varik is forced to journey to the Hotzone in search of Fireseed, a plant his father supposedly developed with magical hybridization properties.
Varik takes Marisa along. Aside from being a terrorist, she’s the beautiful daughter of Melvyn Baron, the biggest real estate mogul in Land Dominion, and the professor’s old rival. Oddly, she knows lots about Fireseed, and what Hotzone land Professor Teitur bought to test the crop, before becoming embittered and trashing the project. No one except Varik knows whether Fireseed once existed off the drawing board. Might the refugees in Vegas-by-the-Sea have answers, or the bizarre Fireseed cult in the Chihuahua desert? Varik, the reluctant hero, must risk burning in the Hotzone, as his mother did, to save the ailing agar, and the world.
(Summary courtesy of Amazon.)
[Full disclosure: Catherine Stine mailed me a copy of FireSeed One in exchange for an honest review.]
Despite the fact that FireSeed One takes place in a highly creative, well-built possible future, I have mixed feelings about it.
For whatever reason, I could not connect with any of the characters. Not a single one piqued my interest and I really didn’t care about what happened to any of them, even the main characters. I’m not sure why this was, but it felt like there wasn’t enough emotion in the writing; I didn’t truly feel the stress Varik was under, his growing love for Marisa, his worry about the augur seeds, etc.
This could be because the world of FireSeed One is so strange and takes a lot of getting used to your first time around, meaning that after a couple read-throughs, my opinion could change. Varik and Marisa are decent enough characters with highly believable backstories, so there is definitely a lot of potential here. It could also be because I am far from the age group Catherine Stine has targeted, as it is a ‘middle years’ novel. Who knows?
Despite my problems with the characters, I had no problems whatsoever with the world of FireSeed One. Catherine Stine has written about a future that’s both exciting and frightening, depending on where you live in said future. It won’t win any awards for including hardcore science, but the scenario she describes is very plausible, depending on whether you think climate change is real or not—a controversy I’m not going to get into. The abandonment of people in the Hotzone is also, sadly, plausible because I have very little faith in humanity if there are dwindling resources in a rapidly changing world.
FireSeed One is a great novel for older tweens and young teens and I suspect most people will connect with the characters much better than I did. So if you’re looking for a novel with decent characters, excellent world-building and a fast-paced plot, you’ll enjoy FireSeed One.
I give this book 4/5 stars.