Subtweet Review: Tell me ALLL about those feelings.

A certain politically-active gentleman had objections to a certain other political group's endeavors to enact certain policies, and engaged his rather impressive numbers of audience-members in opposing these endeavors.  As a result of this attention, a particular audience-member wrote a dystopian novel based around the premise of the opposed endeavors, and sent it to the original gentleman, who was quite taken with this fictionalized narrative that exploited the worst fears of his audience, and arranged for it to be published under his name.  There is now a sequel, and based on the ending of the sequel, an impending series.  I read the original work when it was first published (morbid curiosity) and have now just finished the sequel.

I will say that (judging from memory) the sequel is more capably written than the first.

First off, as with most near-future dystopian scenarios, the reasoning behind this one is frankly preposterous.  I read the words, and I understand the back-history established, but I have serious issues engaging in any real suspension of disbelief.  Despite the earnest attempts of many an author of a dystopia, the world just doesn't actually work that way.  Now, I repeat, this isn't just a problem with this particular duo of books - it's pretty rampant in the genre.  Even far-future dystopias like Hunger Games have real problems with setting up a realistic, workable, functioning, dystopian world.  I'm not even going to talk about Divergent; it gives me a headache.  So the author is in good company here, but it does still make the rest of the book harder to be charitable towards.  If you've put in decent world-building equity, I'm willing to give a lot of other things some slack (points to Hunger Games here, particularly the movies).  If you can't even be bothered to look at basic economics, medicine, and political processes and history, then I have no extra charity to give - I've burned it all on accepting your ridiculous premise and continuing to read.  Zombie dystopias in particular are really awful about this, but this one gives them a run for the money.  World-building here (in addition to the actual unsupportable premise) is sparse.  Granted, that's a function of the limited POVs that we've had so far, but it's still sparse even so, and worse, it's achingly derivative.


Second off, if one is preaching to the choir (which, arguably, is the stated intention of this narrative) it seems that it might not be entirely necessary to beat the readers over the head with the political point quite so constantly.  I will say this, every opportunity to return to the central theme is taken with gusto, so they do have consistency and persistence going for them.  For a reader, it's like trying to focus on the emotional resonance of a movie while someone is working with a jackhammer outside.

Plot is moving along, characterization is happenin-
BRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTTRTRTRRRTRTRRTRTRTR
-good grief.  Ok, we're getting a little more emotionally connected to the -
BRRRRTTTT
Are you quite finished?  Ok, new characters getting introdu-
BRRRT
-ahem - introduced.  More narrative threads getting tangled up with these new -
BRRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRTRRTRTRTR
For the love of God, just stop for a bit!


Thirdly, (and this is a matter of personal opinion - at the very least, JRR Martin disagrees with me strenuously) I believe that a little bit of narrative perspective and a dash of foreshadowing makes for satisfying genre savvy stories that are much more powerful.  There is a slap-dash approach to characters and events that was really frustrating to read through, because everything is given the same intensity.  Everything is downplayed, nothing is emphasized (or at least, emphasized beyond the author using a character to directly tell the reader something is important).

To be specific, there is a character death in this book that frankly made no impact on me because of the way it was presented (with the same flat, affectless recitation of the remainder of the book).  The character themself had no narrative arc.  Nothing to brutally interrupt by death, nothing to ironically fulfill in death.  Nothing even to be simply concluded with death.  There was actually no narrative arc for that character at all, actually, which is a totally different problem, but my point here is this: I can see the bones of the plot in this novel, because it is starved for flesh and skin.  The bones say that this death is supposed to be important.  It's the only death that the heroic characters suffer, and it was at the hands of the major protagonist, right before the final climactic showdown.  But because there was no (or no competent) foreshadowing, no narrative arc, no focus, no narrative intensity, it just - sortof happened.

In fact, because of previous narrative choices, there was an entire section of the rising action where I was unsure if it was even meant to be a death or not.  There was an attempt later (I believe) to make it obvious that the character did in fact die, and to make that moment more dramatic in hindsight.  Or in contrast (unlikely, but possible) it could also be a really inept attempt to make a later twist possible by making it seem that the character is dead when in fact the body that was seen was a totally different person who was unmentioned until their coincidental death in the same way as the character who we saw injured but had no real indication that they are actually dead.  This is not good writing.  This is frustrating to read and think about.  Please, authors.  Just be clear.  If you want to kill someone off (or even to introduce a plot twist) to raise the stakes, make it an Obi-Wan moment, not a random unclear muddle.


Finally, someone ought to introduce this author to the concept of "show, don't tell."  This is actually my main complaint about the sequel I just read (sadly, I don't remember enough of the first novel to comment, other than I felt it was very obviously a first attempt), and by the end of it, I was actually laughing every time a chapter break and resulting viewpoint change came around, because it was so stodgy and clunky.  I will leave you with some relevant quotes from the climax of the book (not to put too fine a point on it, but this would be where one would expect the emotional stakes to be the highest).

"A slim thread of hope now wound around his heart.  For the first time in his life, he felt joy and sorrow at the same time."

"That's when the anger built in her,  Not just anger, but red hot rage.... Emotions pulsed through her faster than she ever thought possible."

"[Character A] and [Character B] were driven by emotion."

"[Character C] felt like his senses were shutting down, because he wanted to disassociate from what he had seen."

"It felt like the whole world should be crying for so many reasons."

(This next one isn't actually an emotional statement, but I had to include it because it actually made me snort my drink up my nose:) "Through the twists and tangles of fate, the hunters would soon become the hunted."



PS - if you're going to create a made-up salute, for the love of everything holy, either give it a proper capitalized name, or just describe it the first few times and then bloody well call it a salute.