Now it’s Risa’s turn to illustrate what I said last chapter about this setup really not seeming like it’s the best way to minimize friction.
Her residency begins with an exercise in humility.
Also I will bet right now that this is not how Connor’s chapter goes.
See, she has to face a tribunal because that is totally what being asked what skills you have is made up of a couple older kids. (I’m really not sure why they need several kids to be doing this for each new one, but I guess because the author wanted to make the comparison.)
The last tribunal Risa faced was back at StaHo, when she was sentenced to be unwound. She can tell these three are bored and don’t care what she says, just as long as they can get on to the next one. She finds herself hating them, just as she hated the headmaster that day he tried to explain why her membership in the human race had been revoked.
What the fuck is with this book hating people for nonsense reasons?
Then the one girl, because there is only ever one girl in a group of three, tries to reassure Risa by saying it’s just to find where she’ll fit in, and all that prompts is Risa to wangst that not fitting in is every Unwind’s problem. And here I thought it was the thing where they decided to kill you for budget reasons.
She says she did music at a state home and regrets it because Even among Unwinds there’s prejudice and pecking orders. Right. “I was super talented but not talented enough so they decided to kill me for budget reasons” is such a worse reason than Connor’s “I’m a colossal fuckup who also has rage issues I can’t even explain so my parents got so sick of me they ordered me killed”. Or, say, klepto-boy last chapter. The state home unwinds should be the most functional and talented unwinds by several miles. They are also the only ones who’d be familiar with the group living and assigned jobs of this place. (I would also assume they make up a lot of the unwinds in general, because killing kids for budget reasons seems far more likely than their parents doing it, plus we know the state home population should be huge to start with.)
But no, one of the boys immediately disapproves while the other boy is the only state home kid of the three.
She says she plays piano.
“Sorry,” says Starboard. “We’ve got enough musicians, and none of the planes came with a piano.”
“‘Survival has earned me the right to be respected,'” Risa says. “Isn’t that one of the Admiral’s rules? I don’t think he’d like your attitude.”
Risa is pretty touchy. Now, if it had been “sneers” instead of “says”, I could understand this, but here she’s just yelling at a guy because she picked a stupid career choice.
Anyway her how dare you point out the talent I just mentioned is obviously not valuable in a scrapyard? makes the guy squirm. Maybe next she can nice-sock him.
The girl continues to play nice cop, but Risa doesn’t give a fuck because she’s decided to be petulant for no reason and says to just tell her to do whatever. So one of the boys says they need people to wash dishes (and where are they even getting the food, when apparently no one ever comes but the buyers and the only people over eighteen in the place are admiral-guy and the helicopter guy?)
“Fine. Dishwasher. Am I done here?”
She turns to leave, doing her best to douse her disgust.
I really have no idea why she’s acting like this beyond that the book just generally hates anyone who isn’t a main character.
On her way out there’s a kid with a bloody nose, who says Connor’s the one who did it (very true) and he’ll pay (which, let’s face it, he deserves, since he could’ve punched Roland instead). Risa jumps into action, telling him to lean forward so he won’t gag and pinch it like so, and the tribunal is so amazed by her basic bloody-nose knowledge they make her medic instead, which is really fucking stupid because the book keeps claiming these are problem kids yet seems most have never experienced a bloody nose.
Particularly annoying is the whole song and dance was unnecessary. All she had to do was say she worked with the nurses caring for the babies, which is still probably closer to medical knowledge than most of the kids come in with.
Funny, but it’s indirectly Connor’s doing, since he’s the one who broke that kid’s nose in the first place.
Shut up about how awesome Connor is.
As for the kid with the bloody nose, he gets assigned to dish washing.
…okay? Is this supposed to be like some sort of schadenfreude thing where he sucks so he deserves dishwashing, or that he sucks because he’s so useless he can only be used for that, or what? He’s just some poor kid Connor punched.
She finds her medicing stressful at first because she doesn’t, you know, actually know much of anything.
There are other kids in the medical jet who seem to know a lot more, but she quickly comes to realize they were thrown into this just like she was, when they first arrived.
“You’ll do fine. You’re a natural,” the senior medic, who is all of seventeen
WHY DO THEY NOT KEEP THE EIGHTEEN YEAR OLDS FOR THIS?
WHY?
Anyway Risa is the secondary main character and therefore more awesome than people other than Connor (and possibly Lev, not sure yet) so this is true, she’s great at it. A month passes like this.
The Admiral was an odd bird, but he’d done something no one else had been able to do for her since she’d left StaHo. He’d given her back her right to exist.
Why are the kids in this so useless? Why does she need some adult guy to validate her right to not be hacked up for parts?
[And here I thought it was the thing where they decided to kill you for budget reasons.]
Yeah, this whole bit reminds me of High school. Right down to the pecking order.
Honestly, this book is total shit. The only reason I’m following is because your commentary makes it worthwhile.
Forgive me if I missed something but doesn’t Risa seem a bit calm about Connor punching another kid? I thought she didn’t want him to fight anyone (well, except maybe Roland and I’d say she has good reason to want to see him beaten up). Random kid comes in with an injury from Connor and all she thinks is how Connor now got her a good job not how Connor’s anger might be getting worse and how dangerous that could be in this kind of environment or even if he might get kicked out for injuring other kids. I just can’t quite figure out what kind of person Risa is supposed to be other than Connor’s future girlfriend. Also.. she’s a natural healer. Of course she is. What else can women do?
No, no, see Risa only cared about that because she was worried he might fight with Roland and get hurt. This is just some other kid who got hurt by Connor, so it’s all good.
Have we addressed yet how dumb “StaHo” is? It’s such an obviously forced nickname — not shorter than the original, not even fun to say.
That’s pretty much every clever term in this book. I don’t know why his editors didn’t take him aside and tell him he had a problem. Maybe sign him up for a Terrible Terms Anonymous group where he could get the support he needed.
I like to think that group is headed by Suzanne Collins.
God, this book is so bad. It feels like something the author hammered out in a week after coming up with the initial idea.
There’s actually a pretty good chance that’s true.
“The state home unwinds should be the most functional and talented unwinds by several miles. They are also the only ones who’d be familiar with the group living and assigned jobs of this place. (I would also assume they make up a lot of the unwinds in general, because killing kids for budget reasons seems far more likely than their parents doing it, plus we know the state home population should be huge to start with.)”
It makes no sense for the state home kids to be the lowest in the pecking order. As you say, they’d be the most functional and talented, and one would expect them to be the majority. I’d have expected that the kids whose biological parents decided to have them unwound would be the ones who were looked down on by state home kids and, depending on the doorstep they were left on, the storked kids, not to mention resented because they were more likely to avoid unwinding than a state home kid, who could be unwound for budgetary reasons, or a storked kid who might have been left on the doorstep of a person or people who had no interest in parenthood.
Connor is shown to be a case of a kid sent for unwinding by his parents because he is a troublemaker. Compared to Mai, who was sent to be unwound because she was a girl, Emby whose aunt sent him to be unwound so she could get his hands on his inheritance (and, really, in this world, you’d expect parents to leave their assets to their minor children in a way that prevented their guardians from unwinding them for profit) or Roland, whose mother had him unwound for defending her against his abusive stepfather, I’d have expected him to be regarded with quite a bit of scorn from at least some of the other kids, even if others were impressed by the Akron AWOL thing.
I’d have expected him to be regarded with quite a bit of scorn from at least some of the other kids
To say nothing of the resentment for him fucking up his life when they tried so much harder not to be unwound.
We know Risa tried so hard to be good enough to keep. You can easily imagine Mai working harder and harder to be the perfect daughter every time her parents talked about how much they wished they had a boy, Emby walking on eggshells around his aunt hoping she wouldn’t do it, Roland growing up knowing that he wasn’t wanted around because his step-father didn’t want to raise someone else’s kid – maybe his mom even threatened him that she’d get rid of him if he made trouble and got in the way of her remarrying.