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You are here: Home / Archives for post-apocalptic

post-apocalptic

Book Review: The Testing, by Joelle Charbonneau

17th May 2014 By Julianne Leave a Comment

Watch this video to find out what the other Bookish Brits thought of The Testing!

Malencia Vale has dreamed of being selected for The Testing for as long as she can remember. She desperately wants to follow in her father’s footsteps, go to the University, and help her world. When Cia is chosen, she wants her parents to be proud., but instead her father tells her about some grisly truths about what the Testing involves. No one is supposed to know what The Testing involves, because all candidates have their memories wiped when the process is over, but he has retained a few snippets of memory, and what he tells Cia chills her to the bone.

There is no escape. Participation is compulsory. So now Cia must go to the city, terrified of what she might encounter, what she will have to do – and the memory wipe that she will go through, if she survives.

I’m not going to lie. The Testing is a lot like The Hunger Games. The opening situation is almost identical – a girl from a minor colony takes part in a ceremony and is selected to go to the big city to compete against others her own age, in order to stay alive.

So honestly, I think this book will be best enjoyed by those who haven’t read very many dystopias. I have pretty much only read The Hunger Games trilogy, and that was a couple of years ago, so I read The Testing with somewhat fresh eyes. I expect that readers who have read, say, five Hunger Games-a-likes in the last year will have less patience with The Testing. Not because it’s a bad book, but because the ideas and character types and twists that these books rely on will inevitably seem less fresh and exciting, even if the writing is good, when you’ve seen them multiple times.

And I think the writing is good. The protagonist, Cia, is a sensible, science-minded but not unemotional, enthusiastic young woman who hopes to make her country, which is struggling to rebuild itself following a war that devastated the world, a better place. There is a backstory to the whole situation that we get to see in small doses as Cia completes her exams. The City, and the Testing officials, are much more ambiguous than the Capitol is in The Hunger Games. Cia is not a child being punished for the sins of her ancestors – she is trying to complete a test that the officials believe, or are led to believe, will help them pick out the future rulers and designers of their nation.

I really enjoyed meeting the other characters – family, friends, and Testing candidates. Cia’s main romantic interest is a boy from her home colony, Tomas, but we never know how much she should trust him. I have to admit that I wasn’t the biggest fan of their romance – I was more intrigued by Will and Stacia, and by Cia’s elder brother, who perhaps should have been Tested himself.

The Testing is (of course) the first in a trilogy, and I think that its ending sets the scene for the second book really well. I think it will start to lose its similarities to The Hunger Games from here on out, so I am really looking forward to reading Independent Study.

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: book review, dystopia, Joelle Charbonneau, post-apocalptic, teenage fiction, The Testing, YA, young adult

Book Review: Defiance, by C.J. Redwine

20th November 2012 By Julianne Leave a Comment

Photo by Antoine Hubert

Sixty days have passed since Rachel’s father Jared was expected to return to the walled city of Baalboden, and the brutally strict Commander has pronounced him dead. Rachel refuses to believe that her father really is dead, holding onto the hope that if she escapes the city, she will find him in the world outside.

Logan is Rachel’s new Protector, assigned to care for her and make sure she obeys the Commander’s rules until she reaches Claiming age and is given to a husband. He doesn’t believe that Jared is dead either, but he wants to keep Rachel safe inside the city, away from the fire-breathing Cursed Ones that claw their way out of the ground and scorch everything around them. But Rachel’s belief that her father still lives arouses the Commander’s suspicions, and soon both she and Logan are struggling to evade his cruel machinations and rescue the people of Baalboden.

I liked Rachel as a heroine. She’s strong and determined and knows how to take care of herself, and it was a nice change to read about a girl character that didn’t start off as a helpless child who needed to be taught how to survive. I enjoyed seeing Rachel make hard choices and kick butt.

I was less interested in Logan, especially once it became clear that he was good at everything! At first I was expecting that he would be the studious, intellectual one, whilst Rachel would do all the physical saving-the-day, but then it turned out he could fight too. His only flaw seems to be that he can’t outwit the Commander and gets angry sometimes. I’m sure plenty of readers won’t mind this, but I thought it made their partnership a bit unbalanced, as Rachel doesn’t have any skills that are hers alone, whereas Logan has a lot of science and technology knowledge that she doesn’t share.

I didn’t get excited about the romance, but I really enjoyed the plot. There are lots of twists and all the reveals come really slowly, which is frustrating at times but makes it an easy book to keep reading.   There is quite a lot that the author left unexplained, which on the one hand is good, because there is lots to look forward to in the next book, but on the other, it stopped me becoming as absorbed in the world of Defiance as I wanted to be.

Baalboden’s society has medieval elements – the ceremonies, the type of jobs people do – and women are effectively property, passed from Protector to Claimer. However, there are sprinklings of futuristic technology, so we are led to believe that the time period in which the story takes place is yet to come. There is a brief description of the events that led up to the founding of Baalboden, mostly to explain why the Commander is so powerful, but it was a bit vague.

The Commander is supposed to be over seventy years old, yet he is fit and strong and agile enough to fight Logan – and I wanted to know why. It’s not that all the characters live longer and healthier lives in this novel than people do in reality – Rachel’s friend Oliver is about the same age, I guessed, but acts appropriately elderly. I would really like to know what’s going on there. And why he hates women. I couldn’t imagine why the people would have let the Commander impose such a restricted lifestyle onto them if they had previously lived in a society at least as free as my own. Perhaps everything will be fully
explained in later books in this series, but I think the setting would have seemed more believable if the history of Rachel and Logan’s world had been explored in more detail in Defiance.

I think that Defiance provides a reasonable set-up for the rest of the series. It’s not as strong a beginning as, say, Under the Never Sky, but that’s another post for another day! I would like to read the next book when it comes out and see if the ground that Defiance didn’t cover is fully explored.

Thank you, Atom Books, for the review copy.

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: book review, books, C.J. Redwine, Courier's Daughter, dystopia, fantasy, post-apocalptic, review, science fiction, teen fiction, teenage fiction, trilogy, YA, young adult

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Hi! I'm Julianne and this is my book blog. Click my picture to read more about me.

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