Pandemonium (by Lauren Oliver)

Pandemonium is the 2^nd book in Lauren Oliver’s dystopian Delirium trilogy. It’s no secret the cat didn’t much care for Delirium, because she found it too much a waste of Oliver’s talent and too much of an easy marketing ploy to hop onto the dystopian bandwagon… but since it’s a trilogy, we were stuck with Delirium for 2 more books, and Pandemonium doesn’t really leave much room to breathe either. We’re thrown smack into the middle of the action, which makes it absolutely necessary to brush up on your Delirium before you delve into this sequel.

Pandemonium is divided into two storylines: Then and Now. In Then we learn about Lena’s time in the Wilds right after she’s escaped Portland. She has to deal with the fact that Alex didn’t make it, and the harsh circumstances of life in the Wilds. In Now, Lena seems to be back in her old oppressive society (in New York this time), but she’s clearly been hardened by her experiences in the wilds and she’s undercover, working for the rebels. In the Now storyline Lena ends up being ‘taken’ by Scavengers (also society outcasts, but not like the resistance Lena’s been staying with) together with a boy called Julian Fineman, who’s a token for the DFA (Delirium Free America). In the Then storyline we learn about what it takes for Lena to end up being the girl who can go undercover for the resistance: a girl who’s lost her love Alex, a girl who had to struggle to get out of her love-less society in the first place only to end up in a place where love is not key, but survival is, and surviving is harsh, survival means running, means fighting, means overcoming everything you thought you’d overcome already by escaping.

It’s refreshing to read how Lena – the dull and passive character – is capable of growth and change in that respect. Not only has she learnt that being passive will not save her, she’s also learning how to live in a world without Alex, in a world where she has to get into the middle of the action, not a world she just gets thrown into because of the ‘love for a boy’. No, it’s all about Lena and her survival now. I liked the emotional yet strong Lena of Pandemonium much more than the meek and placid Lena of Delirium. The interaction that Lena has with the other characters – both in Then and in Now – comes off as a lot more realistic and is consequently more believable than the feelings of Lena & Alex in Delirium, mainly because there was never any buildup to these feelings in Delirium. In Pandemonium you get a reasonable justification for what Lena feels and the way she interacts with the other characters. So in terms of character development, the cat much prefers Pandemonium – up until the last page, the last word even of the book, which – even though it was predictable as hell (love triangles in dystopias and all that, … :::sigh::: why oh why???…)  – just felt as a complete disappointment.

In any case, reading Pandemonium was a much better experience that Delirium was – even despite the total copout ending – none in the least because of Oliver’s sumptuous writing style. Lauren Oliver has a knack for the descriptive and the emotional in her language, and yet again it works a charm. So far, though, Delirium pretty much ‘fits the dystopia formula’… which is for fans of the genre two big thumbs up, but for as many other readers a big letdown. Why would you want to do everything that other sets of books also do?

Beta (by Rachel Cohn)

The name Rachel Cohn used to be synonymous with contemporary urban YA fiction with a bit of a edge. Her Gingerbread series starred the rawer than raw punky teen rebel Cyd Charisse, and when she wrote together with David Levithan, it was Cohn who added the edge, resulting in almost perfect contemporary YA romance novels (Nick & Norah, and Dash and Lily especially are prime examples). In more ways than one Rachel Cohn seems to break with that reputation with her upcoming series of books, of which Beta is the first.

Genre-wise, Beta is nothing like anything Cohn has ever written (or published at least). For the first time, Cohn is well on her way to write dystopian romance (yes, that old thing again). With Beta we enter the perfect world of Demesne, where clones are created from a First (a dead person) in a laboratory with the sole purpose of serving the super-rich inhabitants of the perfectly engineered island. Elysia is a Beta, a new type of teen clone. Like all the other clones, though, she was engineered to be soul-less and to serve. In her case she is bought by a rich family who wants her to be a (more) perfect replacement for their daughter Astrid who’s gone off to the mainland to study (Astrid, BTW, is the absent character of this book – I’ll bet you she’s going to be majorly important in the sequels). Clones are designed not to feel real emotions, but to mimic feelings and emotions based on certain bio-engineered implants they have. However, Elysia not only starts to really feel certain things, she also has memories of her First, something which should be impossible… and yet.

From the very beginning of the book it is clear that these soul-less clones do have a certain form of self-consciousness. When Elysia feels sad for leaving another Beta she says: “I know the reaction occurs because my chip knows how to mimic human responses, and not because I am capable of actually missing Becky. We feel nothing for one another. We don’t need to. I don’t know why my stomach also experiences a hollow emptiness at the thought of leaving this other Beta. There is so much for me to learn – about this island, about my own body chemistry. I am so new.” (p.6).  The observant reader of course knows that Elysia is really feeling anxious for what is going to happen to her. The fact that the story is told in the first person, by Elysia, is an early indication that creating soulless, emotionless beings – even clones – is an illusion, and Elysia will indeed encounter numerous ‘Defects’, just like her. Elysia, the new-born clone is the perfect metaphor for the life of the teenager she was created from: looking at things with fresh eyes,  having incomprehensible conflicting emotions, thinking of rebelling against established orders, making the wrong choices (like e.g. deciding to break free because of a boy, not because it is her own choice – which I for one, was very disappointed by to read!). Elysia is the perfect empty art canvas, and being a teen clone, she is ‘still under development’, just like a regular teenager.

Elysia’s voice is in the beginning of the novel the perfect vessel to set the scene: we get to know the idyllic Demesne the way she gets to know Demesne. Her voice is detached, cool even, which is in tune with the soul-less aspect of being a clone. Through her voice, we learn that Demesne was designed to be perfect: there is, for example, oxygen-enriched air to give “the human body and mind a constant feeling of bliss” (p.22), The air on Demesne is its very own soma. Despite the blissful state of affairs, teens on Demesne still feel the need to transgress by doing “‘raxia”, though, a type of drugs designed to reach true ‘ataraxia’ (happiness)…well, it sort of mimics the effect chocolate has on the brain… The fact that there are such detailed descriptions and elaborate explanations of life on Demesne, causes the book  to have a fairly slow start. It takes a good 150 pages before the story can really take off.

The story we get in the second half of the book is unfortunately not the most original one (kind of AI meets I Robot) and Elysia’s story is prone to rely on coincidences to really advance. Actually to be honest, the whole book feels too formulaic, and that is because one crucial element is missing: Rachel Cohn’s voice. I know, we see what Elysia – the newborn clone – is supposed to see, and as such this book works the way it is supposed to work. It’s Elysia’s voice: from cool and detached to something more than that at the end when it’s clear she’s not just a teen Beta, and has real emotions, can fall in love and yearn like any other teenager. However, that doesn’t exactly make for the most exciting reading material. Oh, the story flows and ebbs nicely enough, but there is very little that sets it apart from other books in the same genre – not even Elysia’s ‘new voice’. What I need in especially this beaten down genre of dystopian romance is something that sets it apart from the rest. I don’t want middle-of-the-road stuff, I want a unique reading experience.

I’ve known Rachel Cohn to be a writer with a unique voice, one whose voice can lift teen romance to a real ‘raxia type of reading experience. *That* is what I want. I don’t want great writers being content with yet another dystopian series just because it’s hot at the moment. It might sell (just like e.g. Lauren Oliver’s Delirium sells like hotcakes), but in my opinion, it doesn’t show the author on top of her game.  I have the exact same objections I had with Beta as I had with Lauren Oliver’s Delirium. I don’t want yet another one of those books. I want a Rachel Cohn book, with Rachel Cohn at the top of her game, not something derivative or formulaic.

Beta is scheduled to come out on 16 October 2012.

Review based on ARC received on NetGalley.

The Drowned Cities (by Paolo Bacigalupi)

In 2011 Paolo Bacigalupi won the Michael L. Printz award with Ship Breaker and this year the companion novel The Drowned Cities has been appearing on a lot of Printz-contenders lists. The Drowned Cities definitely ticks a lot of ‘award winning’ boxes and delivers on a number of different fronts to result in a great – if not disturbingly acute – read. First off, more than its predecessor, The Drowned Cities is a war book, featuring the usual casualties of any war: the kids. However, everything is set in the same world as Ship Breaker: at once bleak, raw and highly believable. Also, it’s one of the few books this year so far that has a true “multi-cultural” feel to it, something that the Printzers might also want in a book.

Because Mahlia – the daughter of a peacekeeper and a Drowned Cities woman – has Chinese features, she is a target in the war between the different (war) factions . It’s in one of the attacks that Mouse rescues the castoff Mahlia. Despite only having one arm (the other hand was chopped off and is now a stump) she becomes a much needed medical assistant to Dr Mahfouz. Mouse, on the other hand, is an orphan, also in Dr Mahfouz’s care. While Mahlia’s father – a peacekeeper – just left, his parents died in a random attack. Random attacks, orphaned kids, kids recruited to be boy soldiers, this is the bleak reality of the damaged world in The Drowned Cities.  For war maggots like Mahlia and Mouse, the future is hopeless, violence only begetting more violence. Bacigalupi, though, explains how “The Drowned Cities hadn’t always been broken. People broke it.”  In the world of The Drowned Cities (a world set in the USA) “no price is too high, and no fight can be surrendered. They [people] aren’t fighting for money, or power or control. Not really. They’re fighting to destroy their enemies. So even if they destroy everything around them, it’s worth it, because they know that they’ll have destroyed the traitors.”  It’s a pretty depressing story, one in which violence is both random and the most obvious solution to any civil war scenario.

However, even though Mahlia and Mouse are the two human protagonists, the main “attraction” if you will of this book is the half-man and augment Tool, who’s actually the true embodiment of a war in which things spiral ever more out of control until you get something that is utterly unmanageable. Tool first showed up in Ship Breaker. Different from the rest of his race, he still does not pledge allegiance to just one master and does not lose his will to live once his master dies. Instead, Tool is all about the survival instinct, a master at reading any given war situation. Tool was bred for war, and now actually surpasses the expectations of his breed by surviving this long.  It is both ironic and only fitting that things start to change for Mahlia and Mouse once they encounter a heavily wounded Tool, who has just escaped from his captors, the troops of Colonel Stern of the UPF. In the jungle, Tool forces Mahlia to get medicine by keeping Mouse hostage. When Mouse gets captured and recruited into the UPF, Mahlia and Tool form a hesitant alliance as Mahlia has had enough of running away from the violence, but rather  wants to enter into the warzone of the Drowned Cities to rescue Mouse who once saved her too.

Bacigalupi’s world is both alienating and completely convincing. Reading this almost feels like Children of Men in the jungle of Apocalypse Now. In a world hit by global warming, global political powers have shifted significantly. Nothing in The Drowned Cities is unbelievable, though, far from it: people destroying people for the sake of destroying things, not knowing any more what the initial reason was? China as the new center of civilization and the USA the main warzone, “because no one took responsibility for what they did, and how it would drive others to respond”… nothing here is fantastical. The (geo)political message is definitely more overt in The Drowned Cities, and unlike in Ship Breaker we get an idea of how this new world order – or rather new world chaos – came about: the sea levels have risen so much that part of countries or whole cities and countries are now ‘drowned’. Some countries thought ahead: China for instance managed to save its main cities. The United States, on the other hand, did not manage to do the same thing because of internal disputes, leading to civil wars. China then sent in peacekeepers to stop the fighting and killing, but once it was obvious that the situation was way beyond their control, they left and different war lords and factions like Army of God or United Patriots Front started to take over. Now they just fight for territory. Also, the way new boy soldiers are recruited is definitely not a figment of Bacigalupi’s imagination. We only have to think of child soldiers in Somalia, Uganda, Congo or Myanmar, and we know that the way Mouse is broken in, is the way it also happens in those countries where war militia make use of children and make monsters of men.

The Drowned Cities is despite its themes of war hostilities, child soldiers, acts of barbarism not without hope. The hope here lies in the humanity and humaneness of its characters, Mahlia and Mouse, but also the half-man Tool who discovers that he is more than his breed. The Drowned Cities is Paolo Bacigalupi at his best.  By just enhancing and switching around a couple of present-day realities Bacigalupi shows us a world that could be our global future. However, he’s not being preachy about it, but instead shows what people do in extreme and hopeless situations. A scary vision, but hopefully one that is still avoidable.

Ashes (by Ilsa J. Bick)

The cat has taken the route of resignation. Today, it seems that 95% of the YA dystopia novels will not tie up in one single volume, but we will get it in threes. Some of these trilogies are incredibly fantastic (e.g. Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking trilogy) and are actually believable as a trilogy where each volume adds another layer to the story, while others should just have quit sometime in the midst of their second volume (e.g. Hunger Games) because they’re just rehashing their first volume and nothing is really added to the complexity of the story or the character development. Ashes, by Ilsa J. Bick, is the first part of a post-apocalyptic trilogy. In what particular category it belongs is not yet clear, though, but I am willing to postpone my final judgment until the next volume.

Alex is 17 and has a brain tumor. She lives with her aunt since her parents’ death. She decides that she does not want to have any more cancer treatments, and sets off for a hike in the Waucamaw Wilderness, to deal with her decision. While hiking she encounters 2 people, 8-year-old Ellie and her grandfather Jack, and their dog Mina. Suddenly a surge of something hits the wilderness, causing Jack to die, Alex to be miraculously rid of the constant pressure in her brain, and Ellie still very bratty and hating everything especially Alex.  Alex, though, has developed a new kind of ‘power’: she can super-smell, which is odd for a girl who didn’t have any sense of taste after the many cancer treatments she had. Also, her memories about her parents are coming back, something which had gone along with the sense of taste. When Alex and Ellie meet up with a young soldier, Tom, the 3 of them not only figure out that the surge must have been some kind of EMP, disabling everything (and everyone who runs on ‘electricity’), but at the same time causing for some seriously disturbing phenomena as well: kids who’ve changed dramatically, brain-zapped, and are now somehow weird cannibalistic zombies…  So far so good, literally… because the introduction of Alex, Ellie and Tom, their interaction, their need for explanation, all that is very cleverly done and more than exciting to read. Enter the second part of the novel, after Alex, Ellie and Tom are separated once again. We enter a strange new world, in the settlement of Rule, we get a completely new set of characters, very cult-ish, and absolutely out of tune with the parts that preceded it. To say that the Rule-part of the book (and adding another potential love interest) feels contrived is being very kind.

Ashes starts off like a blend of 28 Days Later mixed with The Stand and a dash of The Road to flavor it all. If continued like that, this would have made for one killer of a zombie apocalypse thriller. Unfortunately, Ilsa J. Bick gave us 2 halves that don’t make a whole with almost completely different settings, 2 completely different sets of characters, and 2 completely different stories. And while the first setting/set of characters/ story is exciting and captivating, the second is an uninspired add-on that is both slow-paced and frustrating, so much so that I kind of have to wonder whether they were written by the same author?

P.S. Also, I do want to add that there’s one other thing that I found a bit upsetting, for lack of a better word…Alex is 17 and is the proud owner of a …Glock… seriously?

Insurgent (by Veronica Roth)

Given the mega-online campaign preceding the release of Insurgent, it would be an understatement to say that this book was not on the “Most Anticipated Releases” list of 2012. But with anticipation and a great predecessor comes great responsibility, of course, and it remained to be seen whether Veronica Roth could live up to the hype! Well… she can… Insurgent passes the “second book in a trilogy”-test with flying colors…a hard test to pass too. Suzanne Collins – to whom Roth will undoubtedly be likened when it comes to ‘dystopia trilogies with a female protagonist’ – didn’t pass that test with Catching Fire, so Roth definitely has one up on Collins now (not that it’s a competition of course).

Insurgent is the type of book that you don’t want to go into even a teensy weensy spoiled, so I’ll make the summary extremely brief. Insurgent picks up straight after the end of Divergent with Tris and the rest finding temporary sanctuary with the Amity faction. Of course, being all peaceful and wanting to remain neutral all in the name of Amity & Peace is not a viable option when the world as you know it is at stake, so Abnegation-born, but Dauntless-chosen Divergent Tris gets herself into the adrenaline-packed action like there’s no tomorrow. Yet again there is action, violence, action, violence and more action, some of it with a clear purpose, some of it because frustration strikes our protagonists. The excitement factor just spikes through the roof again, but luckily Veronica Roth takes her time to tell the story, and at well-chosen points in the book she leaves the reader to catch his/her breath when Tris and the others get some time to regroup themselves. A clever move[i].  Focusing for instance on Tris’s insecurities after the events that happened in Divergent (<<<spoiler for Divergent>>> shooting Will) not only makes for a break in the action, but also contributes to the character development of the protagonists. For a book that is so plot-driven there is a lot of characterization. A little bit unfortunate maybe, but some of this characterization is there to add to the romance part of the book (Tris and Tobias/Four), but thank the factions that there’s no love triangle in this trilogy! As it is now, the romance stuff is there to show that even though a war might be going on and action is what is necessary, once there is that significant other you’ll think about that person no matter what. Frustrating for both character and reader sometimes, but definitely believable.

And I have to point out once again: Roth chose her telling techniques well too for this one. The first-person present tense perspective works a charm and definitely adds to the cinematic vibe that runs through the entire book. Roth is able to do something that very few authors can: through Tris she shows and tells at the same time. Plus, the frustration Tris feels after certain decisions is the frustration the reader feels too, which with all the twists and turns and questions about “who can you trust?” is a key element in making this story as convincing as possible.

Veronica Roth also addresses a minor annoyance that the cat had about Divergent. Remember how I said that it actually takes a huge amount of willing suspension of disbelief to “accept” Roth’s worldview the way it is? She never actually tells us how this future Chicagoan world came about, but after reading Insurgent I can say that this actually makes perfect sense! Establishing that early on in Book 1 would spoil so much of the enjoyment of this trilogy.

If you want to read Insurgent, you cannot go without at least glancing at a summary of Divergent or you will be lost in the names and motivations of the characters. Veronica Roth has compiled a nice list right here [ii]. The incredible cliffhanger with which Insurgent ends, is going to leave a lot of fans craving the publication of Book 3, and this cat for one cannot wait for that day to be there! Bring it on!

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[i] I have read reviews of Insurgent saying that they feel there’s too much ‘filler’ in between the action of Insurgent and that the action in Divergent was somehow grander…but the cat would argue that the ‘filler’ that these reviewers talk about is a necessary element of Insurgent. Not only does Roth establish and advance the world-building with it (you get a good view of how the different factions interact), she also makes sure that the motivations of the characters are believable. Yes, despite the fact that they might frustrate you (this with regards to the Tris/Four dynamic).

[ii] Why not add this to a future printing of the book?