Review: Girl in the Arena

Title: Girl in the Arena

Author: Lise Haines
Release Date: October 13, 2009
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Cover Designer: Danielle Delaney
Age Audience: YA

Genre: Sci-fi

Tagline: Daughter. Celebrity. Neo-gladiator.
Summary: Lyn is a neo-gladiator's daughter, through and through. Her mother has made a career out of marrying into the high-profile world of televised blood sport, and the rules of the Gladiator Sports Association are second nature to their family. Always lend ineffable confidence to the gladiator. Remind him constantly of his victories. And most importantly: Never leave the stadium when your father is dying. The rules help the family survive, but rules and the GSA can also turn against you. When a gifted young fighter kills Lyn's seventh father, he also captures Lyn's dowry bracelet, which means she must marry him...

Review:
Girl in the Arena had a lot of potential, but the execution was poor. I was expecting a lot better.

I wasn't a fan of the info-dump at the very beginning that went through the history of the neo-gladiator sport, starting in the 1960's. I would have preferred the information to be conveyed little by little as the story progressed.

One of the few things I did enjoy about this book was the concept of gladiators in modern times. People   part of what was known as "Glad culture" lived separated from other people, and often did not marry outsiders. These people were viewed as nearly cultish by some outsiders. What interested me the most was that the rules of the arena were nearly identical to those long ago. No one is forced to fight, but will sign contracts with Caesar's Inc. to fight for a certain number of years, or sometimes a criminal on the death row is sent to the arena. Just like in ancient Rome!
However, I did say almost. I doubt there were hundreds of bylaws confining the original gladiators, and as far as I know, women could remarry as many times as they wanted.

Despite all the information that was given, I don't understand how the sport become popular. Did millions of modern people suddenly find it acceptable? How did it become  lawful? I'm certain there's something in the Constitution against killing for sport. And if the sport was so popular, why did it remain in the U.S. rather than spreading to other countries?

Fighting was not even the main focus of the book. It was mostly about how rough it was for Lyn being a celebrity. There were only two or three battles in the entire book.
I didn't like Lyn at all. She wasn't a distinct character to me. Nothing about her stood out except that she was the daughter of seven gladiators. I also didn't buy the romance between her and Uber. How could you fall in love with the person who killed your father? I couldn't.

I wish the time period had been a little more clear. While there were things we don't have today, such as the Living machine, aside from the Gladiator Sports Association the world of Girl in the Arena was just like today's world. I assumed this book to be dystopian science fiction, but that threw me off.
Speaking of the Living machine, its existence made no sense. How did it work? How did the projections of people eat food? And how did such a machine fit in with the Roman-based culture of the neo-gladiators?

One of the formatting styles of this book annoyed me. Instead of quotation marks, dialogue was indicated by m dashes. I don't see why this was done, as it was unusual and confusing.

The ending was open enough to be followed by a sequel, but apparently this book didn't gain enough popularity for that to happen, and I can see why. On a final note, I very much dislike the cover. I find it more fitting for a TV show poster than a book cover. And the expression of the model seems more pouty than angry to me.

★★

Review: The Adoration of Jenna Fox

Title: The Adoration of Jenna Fox

Series: Jenna Fox Chronicles, #1

Author: Mary E. Pearson
Release Date: April 29, 2008
Publisher: Henry Holt
Cover Designer: Meredith Pratt
Age Audience: YA

Genre: Sci-fi

Tagline: Who is Jenna Fox?

Summary: Seventeen-year-old Jenna has been told that is her name.  She has just awoken from a year-long comma, and she's still recovering from the terrible accident that caused it. Her parents show her home movies of her life, her memories, but she has no recollection. Is she really the same girl she sees on the screen?
Little by little, Jenna begins to remember. But along with the memories come questions—questions no one wants to answer for her. What really happened after the accident?

My Review:
I discovered this book on one of my libraries’ blogs two years ago, way back when I first started reading YA. I don’t know why, but after reading the summary I came to the conclusion that this book was a contemporary amnesia-themed novel and didn’t consider reading it. But a few months ago, I was at the library and I saw it shelved in science fiction! That alone was reason enough to make me pick it up.

The Adoration of Jenna Fox was slow in places, because Jenna regained her memory and grew re-accustomed to the world slowly. But the slow pace allowed a lot of character study. Some parts of the book are written in very short sentences, there are whole pages in which each sentence is only three or four words long. I wasn’t bothered by it, because to me it wasn’t any different from reading a book in verse, but I’m pointing it out because it might bother some people.

I predicted the twist long before it was revealed, but knowing beforehand why the Fox family lived in California instead of Boston, why Jenna couldn’t eat, why no one would answer her questions, did not make me loose interest at all. The biotechnological aspect was fascinating, and it made sense from a scientific viewpoint. However, I wish that we could have learned more about the disasters. Fifteen years prior to the time the book takes place, a huge earthquake in Southern California killed tens of thousands of people. Then came an epidemic that wiped out a quarter of the earth’s population, and then six years of what was called the Second Great Depression. And that’s all we’re told. I wish those nearly-apocalyptic disasters had been explained better.

A few reviewers said they felt that the author was preaching from a pro-life stance. But, while medical ethics play a huge part in the story (things like “How far is too far?”), and Jenna makes a pro-life decision near the end, I wouldn’t say it was preachy at all. If Pearson even was trying to be an influence, she was very, very subtle about it. There were no undertones.

The end of the book was a glimpse into the future, two hundred and sixty years later. It was a good, conclusive ending, but I thought it was beak, and even a little...lonely. I can’t explain why without giving away spoilers, but the ending just gave off that kind of feeling.

While I wasn’t missing out on anything amazing, I really shouldn’t have waited two years to read this! The Adoration of Jenna Fox was a thought-provoking and very intriguing novel. Also, even though I’ve seen several people say that it’s “science fiction for people who don’t like science fiction”, I don’t think you’ll enjoy this book if you don’t like sci-fi. But, if you’re a hopeless sci-fi geek like yours truly, read this book.

★★★½

Review: Wither

Title: Wither
Series: The Chemical Garden trilogy, #1 
Author: Lauren DeStefano
Release Date: March 22, 2011
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Cover Designer: Lizzy Bromley
Age Audience: YA
Genre: Sci-fi
Tagline: What if you knew exactly when you would die?
Summary: Thanks to modern science, every human being has become a ticking genetic time bomb—males only live to age twenty-five, and females only live to age twenty. In this bleak landscape, young girls are kidnapped and forced into polygamous marriages to keep the population from dying out.
When sixteen-year-old Rhine Ellery is taken by the Gatherers to become a bride, she enters a world of wealth and privilege. Despite her husband Linden's genuine love for her, and a tenuous trust among her sister wives, Rhine has one purpose: to escape—to find her twin brother and go home.
But Rhine has more to contend with than losing her freedom. Linden's eccentric father is bent on finding an antidote to the genetic virus that is getting closer to taking his son, even if it means collecting corpses in order to test his experiments. With the help of Gabriel, a servant Rhine is growing dangerously attracted to, Rhine attempts to break free, in the limited time she has left.

My Review:

To be honest, I had HUGE expectations for this book. But for some reason, I put off reading for a long time. I don’t know why. But as soon as I started reading it, I was thinking things like, “WOW! Why haven’t I read this already?!?”

I was drawn from the first page, when the book opens with Rhine in the dark back of a van, captured by people called Gatherers who kidnap girls and sell them off as brides. Everything about this book was intriguing, from Rhine’s history to Housemaster Vaughn’s experiments to find an antidote for the virus. It got pretty creepy at times, but I thought it was a good kind of creepy.

I loved the relationships between the characters, especially between Rhine and her sister wives Cecily, Jenna and Rose. At first she doesn’t care about them at all, but she becomes friends with Rose, and later Jenna, and soon enough she thinks of them all as sisters. I found Cecily to be a little annoying in the beginning, but I warmed up to her as she matured. She was the youngest sister wife, and didn’t really know what was going on.
And then there was their husband, Linden. Rhine loathes him at first for taking her away from her home, but she almost starts to sympathize with him as she discovers that he is just as much of a prisoner as she is.

There’s one thing I want to point out, and it is that even though the summary makes it sound like there is a love triangle in this book, I wouldn’t say there was. Rhine becomes very good friends with the attendant Gabriel before she even starts to feel attracted to him, and she knows she doesn’t want to be like a true wife to Linden. Rhine wasn’t looking for a romantic relationship. Her purpose was to escape and go home to her brother Rowan.

The writing was very good. There were lovely descriptions, but they didn’t slow down the book and were not overly wordy. Come to think of it, Wither was actually quite slow-paced, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way. The slow pace let you take in the dystopian world better than you would have been able to if the book had been fast-paced.

This book easily could have gotten 5 stars from me, but here’s the reason it didn't: the scientific aspect didn’t make much sense. I know this is science fiction, but still. Why did the virus kill men and women at a different age? Unless there is a separate virus for each gender, it should kill them both at the same age. Also, the polar ice caps are huge! If they melted, not even North America would be saved from a watery grave.

Other than that one little criticism, I loved dark, suspenseful Wither. This is a book that I’m going to shove in all of my friend’s faces and say, “Hey! Have you read Wither? If you haven’t, READ IT. NOW.”

★★★★½

Review: All These Things I've Done

This is the review of an uncorrected advance copy. Changes may be made in the final book. The cover shown below may be changed or altered before the book's release.

Title: All These Things I've Done (Birthright, #1)
Author: Gabrielle Zevin
Release Date: September 27, 2011
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Cover Designer: N/A
Age Audience: YA
Genre: Sci-fi
Summary: It's 2083. Chocolate and coffee are illegal, paper is hard to find, water is increasingly scarce, and New York City is rife with crime and poverty. And yet, for Anya Balanchine, the sixteen-year-old daughter of the city’s most notorious (and dead) crime boss, life is fairly routine—going to school, taking care of her siblings and her dying grandmother, trying to avoid falling in love with the new assistant D.A.'s son, and avoiding her loser ex-boyfriend. That is until someone in her inner circle ends up poisoned by the chocolate her family manufactures and the police think she’s to blame. Suddenly, Anya finds herself thrust unwillingly into the spotlight—at school, in the news, and most importantly, within her mafiya family.

My Review:
Wow. This book was nothing like what I was expecting. And I mean that in a good way!

I loved how All These Things I’ve Done was set in the near future, so the world hadn’t progressed drastically. I liked being able to recognize things from today. For example, when Anya goes to Liberty Island (which wasn’t a tourist spot anymore), she talks about a statue of feet wearing sandals which I recognized to be the remains of the Statue of Liberty. But things still had changed. Water is rationed, paper books are rare, and caffeine is illegal.

Anya was an awesome protagonist. I loved how she was realistic about relationships; it was something I could relate to. I also loved how her relationship with Win had development, and it wasn’t over-emotional or angsty. But that doesn’t mean it was lacking in the passion which comes in later. (Yay for development!)

I also found the crime-family aspect to be very intriguing. Anya’s father was head of the chocolate mafia before he died, so often his old friends and colleagues showed up to create conflict and suspense that made this book so much more enjoyable.

Original, engrossing, and stunning. This is the first book by Gabrielle Zevin that I’ve read, but it surely will not be the last! I can’t wait for the sequel to All These Things I’ve Done!
★★★★

Review: Across the Universe

Title: Across the Universe (Across the Universe, #1)
Author: Beth Revis
Release Date: January 11, 2011
Publisher: Razorbill
Cover Designer: N/A
Age Audience: YA
Genre: Sci-fi
Summary: Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awaken on a new planet, three hundred years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end fifty years too soon. Amy quickly realizes that her awakening was no mere computer malfunction. Someone—one of the few thousand inhabitants of the spaceship—tried to kill her. And if Amy doesn't do something soon, her parents will be next. Now Amy must race to unlock Godspeed's hidden secrets. But out of her list of murder suspects, there's only one who matters: Elder, the future leader of the ship and the love she could never have seen coming.

My Review:
★★★½
First of all, thank you to Brooke from Brooke's Box of Books for pointing out that there are ship blueprints on the other side of the book jacket! I never would have discovered them otherwise.

Anyways, the two things that drew me to this book were the Beatles reference in the title (I am a sucker for Beatles references) and the sub-genre (space opera isn't that popular nowadays). It took me awhile to get around to reading this, but it was definitely worth reading!

Across the Universe was a bit slow to start, but after about 75 pages in I couldn’t stop reading. Something about Revis’ descriptions of the ship make you feel…claustrophobic. I know that word is over-used in describing this book, but it’s honestly the best word that describes the feeling you get while reading.

While I didn’t feel especially attached to any of the characters, they weren’t boring or uninteresting either. I liked the switching POV, because we got to see the Godspeed through the eyes of both someone familiar with it, and a newcomer. However, the romance in this book was barely romance. What Elder felt for Amy was more like obsession than love. He was only interested in her because she was different. I have no idea what Amy saw in Elder.

My biggest issue with this book was the “Season” (to those of you who haven’t read the book, it’s when the people of the Godspeed have sex for days to produce the ship’s next generation). Revis really didn’t spare any details. I am strongly against censorship in YA, but…..does a YA book really need graphic descriptions of 30-year-olds doing it in the fields?

I figured out who the killer was halfway through the book. And the climax, while it was very well-done, was predictable too. Anyone with knowledge of basic math could have figured it out near the beginning of the book. The ending wasn’t exactly a cliffhanger, but there were questions left unanswered.

Despite my criticisms, Across the Universe was a really good book. Who knows? Maybe when the dystopia craze* blows over, YA space opera will rise to popularity!

*Not that I mind the dystopia craze. Sci-fi is sci-fi.

Review: Matched

Title: Matched (Matched, #1)
Author: Ally Condie
Release Date: November 30, 2010
Publisher: Dutton
Cover Designer: Theresa M. Evangelista
Age Audience: YA
Genre: Sci-fi
Summary: Cassia has always trusted the Society to make the right choices for her. So when Xander's face appears on-screen at her Matching ceremony, Cassia knows with complete certainty that he is her ideal mate...until she sees Ky Markham's face flash for an instant before the screen fades to black. The Society tells her it's a rare malfunction, and that she should focus on the happy life she's destined to lead with Xander. But Cassia can't stop thinking about Ky, and as they slowly fall in love, Cassia begins to doubt the Society's infallibility and is faced with an impossible choice: between Xander and Ky, between the only life she's known and a path that no one else has dared to follow.

My Review:
★★★
First of all, isn't the cover lovely? It's also symbolic, because at one part in the book, Cassia says,

"I feel like I'm trapped in glass, and I want to break free."

But I'm sorry to say that this book was nowhere near as beautiful as its cover. Okay, that's a little harsh. But it wasn't.

If the cover doesn't make you want to read this, then the premise definitely should. It sounds like an interesting plot, doesn't it? It helped that sci-fi is one of my favorite genres. So I put myself on the library waiting list for this book as soon as it was released.

Anyways, Cassia was a good, well-rounded character. Though at times she was a little selfish, that just goes to show she has flaws and isn't perfect. And another plus: character development! Well, at least in Cassia's case. Throughout the book you can see how she develops from a follower of the Society to a rebel.
I expected Ky to be one of those "I'm-super-hot-and-I-have-a-secret-and-that's-about-it" kind of characters (think Damien from Evermore), but Ky was actually a very good character. I expected the romance between him and Cassia to be some pathetic "love at first sight" crap, but they actually get to know each other and their relationship had buildup, which I appreciated.
However, Xander was a stereotypical boy-next-door. He didn't have much depth.
Em and Piper were extremely flat and predictable. It felt like the author just threw them in because Cassia needed friends.

The writing was good, some of the descriptions were very pretty. However, because of the first-person point of view, the descriptions sounded out-of-place rather than poetic. I mean, nobody talks like that in their inner monologue. So I would have liked this book better if it had been told in third-person point of view rather than first person.

Also, Condie is terrible with explanations! You never really find out how the Society came to be, or how things generally work. I really hope that we'll get more explanations in the next book.

But that's not even my biggest criticism: Matched was way too similar to The Giver.
The Society was just The Community under another name. And the Matching system, the uniforms, the job system, pills that control emotions, not choosing the amount of children you want to have, all that and more was in The Giver first! And since The Giver is one of my all-time favorites, I will defend it to the ends of the earth.

So my conclusion is that Matched was a good book. It was a great book! But not worth all the hype.

Review: Devoted

Title: Devoted
Author: Shirlene Obuobi
Release Date: April 13, 2009
Publisher: IUniverse
Cover Designer: Shirlene Obuobi
Age Audience: YA
Genre: Sci-fi
Summary: After waking from a frightful nightmare, sixteen-year-old Abigail Lingston is alarmed to find that she is no longer herself. Her mind is now inhabited by a terrifying entity. Soon after causing a tragic accident, Abigail falls through the Tear into a new dimension, Fosha. At first glance, Fosha seems a perfect haven. But shadowy manifestations of emotion called Reefers terrorize citizens with feelings that should have died long ago. When discovered to be the Heiress, Abigail must quickly orient herself to the ways of Fosha and learn all she can if she is to successfully defeat the Reefers and make Fosha safe again.

My Review:
★★½
I was going to give this ★★, but I'm being generous because Obuobi was only 15 when she started this book.

The premise of this book sounds interesting, doesn't it? It's a unique idea, the Reefers. I'm surprised that this book is so little-known, but that could have to do with the fact that it was self-published.

The writing was good, very descriptive and lively. However, the weak point of the writing was that it was often over-dramatic when attempting to be lyrical. Also, the twists and turns of the plot were never a surprise because of the constantly changing points of view. We never get to feel Abigail's shock when she discovers things, because we already knew about it from a different character pages ago.

Another flaw of this book was that Fosha was too similar to Earth. Fosha is a completely different dimension, so you'd expect it to be more unique. But in one scene, Silver makes a reference to the Easter Bunny. How could he have known about the Easter Bunny? Is there an Easter Bunny in Fosha? What's with that? Also, it would have been nice to get an explanation of how they managed to fit giant wings inside the Foshan's backs that pop in and out at will. That part never made sense to me. There were many other plot holes that I'd go crazy trying to figure out how it made sense.

Also, whoever edited this book did a terrible job. There were more than just the simple punctuation and capitalization errors often present in published books. There were actual spelling errors. There were many, but I think the worst one is in the part where Abigail is washing her plate and she pours "pink liquid soup" on the sponge.

The ending of this book was a crossover between a cliffhanger and just plain confusing. Obuobi said there will be a sequel, but seeing that Devoted was published in 2009, I don't think there will be one anytime soon.