So our cover designer is back on more familiar ground. Standing and facing away from the camera is no fainting tuberculosis victim on the riverbank, but at least it’s relatively passive.

I actually like this sequence of covers because you can really see exactly the moment they scream and go OH GOD HOW DOES THIS WORK. It was scary for a bit in the middle there, wasn’t it? How girl do things? Thank god it’s over and we’re back to women being passive objects of mystery.

I expect people would argue this is a strong cover, showing she’s successfully broken free of the bubble, but that isn’t what it looks like to me. It looks kind of like hatching from an egg, with the newborn wandering away from the shell just because that’s what you do next. She’s turned away, which makes this seem more like she’s dazed and a victim than triumphant and accomplished. Someone proud of what they’ve done should be facing the camera, defiant and proud, looking out for anyone who thinks they can stuff her back in there.

Looking at this I get the sense she doesn’t really know what to do, and the strongest interpretation I can get is she’s overcome something bad and is now walking away from it into an uncertain future, which has its place but is not exactly triumph, and looks downright bad given she was actively breaking free last book. There is, in sum, no sense she’s won here.

And while I suppose you could say that the cover is supposed to be the hook, so she’s not supposed to have won yet…there’s no sense of winning coming up as a possibility. She’s overcome the bubble and is wandering out into the empty void of a world. It feels like a melancholy ending. Those too have their place, but so does drowning, and it doesn’t change the fact this does not seem like anything other than business as usual in YA land.

If the first book is her trapped in the bubble and the second her punching a hole in it, a suitable third would have been the bubble exploding outward as she finally stood up. Instead we avoid the moment when she’s active and only check back after all the debris is gone, so there’s no evidence of how it happened or assertiveness shown. Maybe someone else broke her out instead and then left. Anything but showing she did it herself.

At any rate.

This is not exactly a good book, but the first half of it is actually decent, if kicking Cassia to the side in the process. She’s not as passive an object as some of the really terrible YA I’ve been seeing, but this is not really the story of Cassia changing stuff so much as wandering around and sometimes having an impact on the plot. So…the cover is pretty accurate to the plot. It has that in its favor. It really only looks bad as an ending book, when one starts asking questions like “Why is Cassia good enough to carry the book when it’s about romance but when it’s a rebellion most of it has to be about how special and vital her boyfriends are?”
At least it doesn’t end up having Cassia turn out immune to the amnesia pills, which would’ve been way too much of a coincidence……instead it has her turn out to be related to the rebellion blah blah but at least not everyone’s immune to the damn pill. (Oh, the red pill immunity is because of rebellion people giving some babies a thing that’ll make them immune, and it never occurs to anybody to just pass out the same immunity thing to their members.) She ultimately willpowers her way to remembering, but I found that less annoying because it’s easy to picture the red pill’s mechanism being to sever links to memories rather than delete them, and the general culture is one of drifting along helplessly so it’d be very rare for anyone to try to push for their memories.

The rebellion, who last book the main characters were suspicious of because they just were, turns out to have a really good plan for a bloodless coup, so this now has the distinction of having the best portrayal of a rebellion in American YA. See, a plague has appeared that the society can’t cure, but happens to only put people in a coma, so it’s fine to wait until it’s hit critical mass before coming in with the cure. I was expecting the rebellion to have designed it, because it’s the most convenient thing ever for them, but instead we find out that the society made it to wipe out the enemy, who by the way have been quite wiped out, because obviously when designing plagues to wipe people out you want to make sure the disease causes no lasting damage,  and it happened to get into society lands, and also the bombs poisoning the fish are actually there to spread the disease because what better way to spread an illness than poisoning all life int the water and then hoping people drink it anyway, except for how none of the characters got it last book despite messing with the poison bombs themselves, and basically once the second half gets going it’s full of explanations but none of them make the slightest sense. (Then the disease mutates, but by amazing coincidence the last village of non-society holdouts were immune to the original plague, the first mutation, and the new deadly one, because of a plant they happened to eat, and eventually they figure it out. I spent the whole time howling that it’s smallpox you dumbfucks you don’t even need to process the virus just huff the scabs.)

The science of it overall is just iffy, not absolutely terrible. The author seems to understand even that treating a disease can cause it to mutate, although the mechanism for it here is a fumbling mess. We also get hard data on population numbers! Pre-plague, it’s 22 million. Decent sized, especially since their matching system moving people to new areas means gene flow is maximized, and big enough that you can see how they’d manage relatively stable industry while still having to be really careful about resources. It’s like the anti-Panem.

We also get the answer to how Cassia was matched to Ky – rebellion officials apparently were just trolling, so they blackmailed Cassia into doing a sort with extra data and lots of hacking and then had her take a red pill so she didn’t remember, which in turn means the whole plot of the first book makes no sense – the matching officials were using her as an experiment on the basis her match with Ky was perfect, except that apparently Ky was only matched because hacking, and sure, we know Cassia has super sorting powers so obviously her sort was perfect, but from the official perspective, all that happened was someone hacked it to mess up the pairings. Indeed, early on in the book Cassia deliberately mismatches a whole set of data (also for matchings) at rebellion orders as part of making people see that the society’s promises are breaking down, but it actually makes sense at this point because they’re just adding extra stress on an already breaking system to crack it in half a little faster.

All the answers this book has are like that – generally terrible and usually introducing all sorts of new nonsense.

The first half, it was decent. It actually seems like a whole separate story from the previous two. You could just start here, at a bunch of characters working right as a rebellion goes through. They’re all stary-eyed about how wonderful the rebellion is, and the pilot thing, while stupid, actually works this time because you realize these are people who don’t understand the concept of stories or metaphors or anything – they’ve had such a division between official fiction that everyone knows by rote and the rumormill that even though the whole “pilot” business is a bunch of stories, and people taking on the name just means they’re someone using the name, no one actually knows how to tell the difference between reality and fantasy.

(Not that it matters because past the halfway point, people who start dying of the disease gain psychic hivemind powers where they spend their comas chatting with their comatose loved ones and saying goodbye to those who die and at that point sure why the hell can’t “pilot” be a magic title?)

After the halfway point, though, it’s more and more explanations that don’t make sense intermixed with a plodding “people are dying where’s the cure is this the cure no okay how about this?” plot. (We also learn that the dead kid Ky was a replacement for actually didn’t die, and his family brought their relative’s kid to mysterious mythical safe lands no one ever returns from so that in return Ky might be adopted by the other family, except that as you recall Ky was only adopted because by chance he survived his village getting razed to the ground, and also there’s no reason they couldn’t shove both kids to the definitely not fake safe place together.)  Also, the first half has good competing love interests for both boys, while the second half resolves that issue by having Ky’s secondary love interest suicide after infection for no fucking reason whatsoever to clear the way for Cassia, while so boring I’ve already forgotten his name’s secondary love interest doesn’t, therefore he ends up with her while Ky ends up with Cassia. Oh, and his secondary love interest reveals the ~shocking truth~ that her own dead match she’s been mourning wasn’t officially matched to her and she picked her own! except that’s no big deal because you can absolutely remain single and date who you like, you just can’t marry them. And dead match naturally was a boy because this metaphor about societal deciding who you marry continues to have nothing to do with gay kids, as they do not exist.

Incidentally, this book is yet another Mormon author and I have to wonder if the fact I’m hitting so much stuff all in the same mode of gay denial has anything to do with Mormons seeming so overrepresented in YA fiction, or at least the YA fiction that’s heavily promoted.

Like I said, Cassia is pretty marginalized, but that’s only annoying when you know she started off as the main character. There’s actually a pretty decent crop of other female characters who range from good to bad morally and all manage to be independent people and not just props for the men, so at least it has that.

“Thank you,” I said. Then, thinking of the words of the Thomas poem, which Ky always thought I might be able to trade, I asked, “What about poems that are remembered?”
“You mean, poems with no paper document to back them up?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“There was a time when we would accept those, though the value was less,” she said. “That is no longer the case.”

Because it being on original paper is so much more important than actually fucking archiving information, huh. Sure, you could record the poems and see when people in different areas say the same thing to tell if it’s a preexisting poem, but those aren’t on historical mint paper so who cares?

The author does come down against the idea, sort of, but it seems like her actual reasoning is pretty poor – she doesn’t seem to recognize how historians work at all, so she doesn’t see anything wrong with this. She just eventually comes to the idea that just obsessing over the classics is dumb. (And never really gets that it’s the exact same damn thing as the Hundred Whatevers, just with a larger number.) She recognizes that people just want to tell stories, but we’re never given reasons for why the archivists are all classical fetishists, especially when they turn out to be a general black market for any goods and services and it’s obvious that in a world where there are 200 works of fiction plus 100 songs that no one can even sing, people would be pretty desperate for anything new. And that’s before we consider that, regardless of what the book has its characters say all the time, I don’t think the classics of a culture they don’t even remember would have all that much draw compared to stuff written by their own people. (I read a short story once in the future where “authors” were the people who did a thing that cast their mind out backward in time where they found an actual author and could read snippets of the story for the future audience, who could barely make sense of it. The main character was annoyed because his past-author was unknown and people cared mostly about how much the name of the past author was mentioned in surviving records, even though his snippets of actual story were extremely popular, and it turned out he had never done the mind-casting and was actually making up his stuff himself. Then I think he got disintegrated by a robot for being weird by future standards and that was it, because a lot of old short stories were kind of crappy like that, but the part about the future guy, even with no real training and having to just recite stuff on the fly, saying stuff that was more interesting to the future audience really rang true to me.)

What’s particularly weird is that the book dives into the idea that it’s a divide between people who think everything’s been done before so it’s a waste to do it again and people who aren’t uptight assholes, even though Ky in the first book says it’s about control, the changed story of the Sisyphus and the pilot show how people use stories to pass information, and this book even shows us that the official “classical” stories don’t necessarily involve classic stories but some rewritten ones to fit the society’s values, as shown by Goldilocks now being a story about a little girl trying other people’s stuff and always finding that the one the society said is for her is the one that’s just right. The winnowing down of people’s options never had anything to do with them being unnecessary, it had to do with removing any subversive beliefs.

The Society is dying, is dead.
Tears stream down my cheeks. In spite of myself, I find that I am crying for the
Society, for its end. For the death of what did keep some of us safe for a very long time.

Oh no, the thing that appears to have existed just to murder ever-increasing numbers of its own people and mindrape the remainder is gone! How bittersweet their victory!

I was bracing myself for the rebellion to turn out to be just as evil, and…sort of, but they’re pretty legitimately well-meaning in the first half, and in the second half we find out that while they were infiltrating the society the society was infiltrating them right back, so the idea was that they’d rebel against themselves, make everyone feel like things would be fixed now, and then keep on the way they were, except that’s fucking stupid because a) the society only works on inertia and the idea it can’t be changed and b) the only real reason they had so many people on their side is the society’s winning combo of mass murder and working the remaining population to the bone, which they were only doing as part of their fake war, which they were either doing for no reason at all or because they were trying to incite the rebellion to fake a change in government that was only needed because of the mass murder thing. Rebellions are just the worst way to keep control, they always lead to more rebellions within the group because you’ve got a lot of trained, motivated people with opinions who’ve just see rebellions work to cause change.

I guess we’re just supposed to take it as a given that people were super rebellious already despite the portrait the first book paints of a society whose weak points come almost entirely from anger at losses and exhaustion from overwork.

I’m dubious of how much credit to give the author for not making the rebellion pure evil. It seems like it’s just that she insists the society wasn’t all that bad, so since the rebellion is actually the exact same thing, it’s not too bad to about the same degree.

We also hear waaaaaaaaay too much about how beyond the dead enemy’s territory is the mythical “otherlands” which are super duper great, so great no one’s ever come back!

“But no one ever came back,” I say.
“People like you see that as evidence that the Otherlands aren’t real,” Leyna tells me.
“People like me see it is evidence that it’s a place so wonderful no one would ever want to come back.

No no, they’re obviously “real” in the sense that if they weren’t, people would’ve survived to come back. It’s amazing how much they manage to talk about this without ever giving any real information.

This is a particularly weird excuse given the whole book is about sacrificing for people you love, yet apparently all those sacrifices are one-way – the person you sacrifice to get to safety never comes back to help more people along.

Or maybe not so weird, because as you may have gathered by the fact this review is a jumbled mess, the book was a jumbled mess of stuff happening that made less and less sense as time went on.

It’s a lot better than the last book, in that it’s not dicking around in the mountains for no reason while random things happen that don’t make sense, and more coherent, but it’s still a lot of random stuff happening. It’s a big contrast to how well constructed Matched was, probably because Matched was meant to be a single book and the author then threw stuff together to try to make a trilogy.

So, with this we’ve manage to get down to only five continuing series, minus Exalted and Animorphs. New poll will be up shortly.