The Windup Girl

Title: The Windup Girl

Author: Paolo Bacigalupi

Publisher: Night Shade Books (2009)

Genre(s): Fiction, Science Fiction, Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Length: 359 pages

Synopsis:  Life is uncertain in Bangkok.  Everyone's got a secret to hide.  Anderson is working with the hated AgriGen company, out to steal the genetic biodiversity the company needs to keep its seed stocks one step ahead of mutating diseases.  Emiko is a wind-up girl, one of the New People genetically engineered for perfection and now discarded as last year's model.  Hock Seng is a refugee; once the master of a great trading empire, he was forced to the fringes of society when he fled.  As tensions in the city grow between the Environment Ministry's "white-shirts" and the powerful forces of Trade, whose secrets will be profitable?  And whose will lead to disaster?

My Rating: 3 Stars

My Opinion:  I really, truly, desperately wanted to like this book.  With a great premise and so much potential (not to mention multiple awards and rave endorsements from great authors), I was really prepared to love this book.  I didn't.  I'm not certain what it was that didn't click.  Perhaps it's the jumble of characters, all with unclear motives and mixed loyalties, or maybe the slow, steady pacing that's less of a roller-coaster and more of a stroll in the park...albeit a grim, impoverished, dangerous, gritty park.  The characters seem realistic, the world Bacigalupi's created is so plausible it's terrifying, and yet I never really felt a part of it.  It honestly pains me to say that I didn't enjoy something so well written and thought out, as this clearly is, but I could not relate to the characters and could not find a flow to the story.  It took me ages to get through as I waited for the other shoe to drop, and now here I sit with the shoe still dangling.  I don't love books that wrap all the loose ends into a nice neat bow, but here I felt that the story never really got started.  The characters appear only at the fringes of one another's lives, with a few notable exceptions.  Their narratives feel disjointed, and while they permit the reader a bird's eye view of this Bangkok of the future, I found myself wanting to be more than impartial observer.  The world of the story is so deeply envisioned that I wanted to feel it myself.  Unfortunately, I never found my way through that fourth wall into the story, and though I watched until the very end, I walked away from it unmoved.

Ship Breaker

Title: Ship Breaker

Author: Paolo Bacigalupi

Publisher: Little Brown and Company (2010)

Genre(s): Young Adult Fiction, Dystopian Fiction, Post Apocalyptic Fiction

Length: 323 pages

Synopsis:  In a not-too-distant future, life is grim for the poor.  Nailer is one of them.  He's a member of the "light crew" of ship breakers at Bright Sands Beach, scraping a meager living from tearing apart the oil tankers.  His mother died of sickness, and his father slipped into a haze of violence and drug abuse.  Soon, Nailer himself will be out of a job, too big to scramble into the narrowest crevices of the wrecked ships  for light scavenge, and too small to be of much use on the heavy crews that tear apart the ships' structure.  He's got nothing to look forward to except the occasional sight of clipper ships out on the sea.  They're beautiful craft, white and elegant as a seabird in flight, but Nailer knows he'll never have the chance to see one up close.  Or so he thinks, until a storm brings a him to a very different kind of shipwreck, one that offers him a chance to leave behind the life of a salvager forever. 

My Rating: 4 Stars

My Opinion:  
The popularity of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction in the young adult market makes it very difficult for books in this niche to make a statement.  Ship Breaker is a good book; the characters are flawed in ways that are entirely believable.  The best laid plans don't always work out.  Moreover, the environmental disaster that reduced Bacigalpi's world to its current state is completely realistic, as are the long term consequences.  But despite its strengths, the book doesn't quite come alive in ways the reader might hope.  It's certainly a worthwhile read, and very enjoyable, but it didn't resonate in ways that would keep me coming back for rereads, or dashing out to purchase the next book in the series (The Drowned Cities, 2012).  It is refreshing to see dystopian books, however, in which the characters do not immediately set out to overthrow the unjust ruling system.  Perhaps that's where the series will ultimately end up, but Bacigalupi respects his characters enough to let them work on resolving their own problems before they set out to fix the world's. 

Divergent

Title: Divergent

Author: Veronica Roth

Publisher: Katherine Tegan Books (2011)

Genre(s): Young Adult Fiction, Science Fiction, Post-apocalyptic Fiction, Dystopian Fiction

Length: 487 pages

Synopsis:  Of all the five factions, Beatrice is sure that her parents' faction, Abnegation, is where she least belongs.  Soon, though, she will have to make a choice.  Does she dare do what so few Abnegation children have done, and leave her family behind forever?  When the tests meant to guide her choice leave her with more questions than answers and with tensions between factions growing every day, Beatrice doesn't know where to turn.  Is she brave enough to walk away from Abnegation?  Is she selfless enough to stay?  She has only  one chance and only one choice.

My Rating: 4 Stars

My Opinion:
This felt to me like a slightly grittier version of The Hunger Games.  I say grittier because unlike so many novels that have teens battling it out in physical confrontation, these kids hurt.  They don't have the slick skills that let them easily excell and every inch must be earned.  I liked Tris and how her character grows and expands and feels and thinks throughout this story.  She doesn't have it all together; she's scared and selfish and cruel as often as she's kind and brave and caring, just like so many of us.  She isn't perfect, but she does what she has to.  Nonetheless, the last quarter or so of the story spirals quickly beyond the scope of the individual, setting Tris not only against herself and the immediate threats of faction life, but also the political upheaval and turmoil of her futuristic city.  It felt like the final confrontation came too fast to me and that it was relatively easily resolved, though of course there's plenty still to be told in the sequel, Insurgent.  It's always hard to set a single individual against an entire power structure, and though it may not be entirely effective here, neither is it quite the same as the obvious parallel, The Hunger Games.  This still feels more personal, and I'd like to see it stay that way in the next book.  Roth's characters are her strength, but with such sweeping plot possibilities, I fear she might sweep them right away.

The Eleventh Plague

Title: The Eleventh Plague

Author: Jeff Hirsch

Publisher: Scholastic, Inc. (2011)

Genre(s): Young Adult Fiction, Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Length: 278 pages

Synopsis:  For Stephen Quinn, death is a daily occurrence.  He was born in the years after the Collapse, the international conflict that ended with the release of P-11, a deadly plague that wiped out most of the American populace.  Stephen and his family were salvagers, gathering bits of the past to trade, held together by the military discipline of his grandfather.  But the world is a cruel, harsh place, as Stephen’s grandfather reminds him on a daily basis.  Before long, Stephen finds himself alone, forced to make his own decisions.  When he comes across the town of Settler’s Landing, it all seems too good to be true— stable families, houses, medicine.  His grandfather’s voice whispers incessantly, “No one does anything for free.”  But Stephen is on his own now.  Can he risk everything he’s known for a life in Settler’s Landing?  More importantly, can he afford not to?

My Rating: 3 Stars

My Opinion: 

This is not typical post-apocalyptic literature.  For books like The Hunger Games, The Road, even  Brave New World, the very post-apocalyptic-ness of the world acts more as a character than a setting.  It is crucial, shaping   The Eleventh Plague is post-apocalyptic in the sense that the disasters that stripped away the world as we know it are truly in the past.  Stephen is a member of the first generation that has known only this new world, and for him the Collapse is only a story his parents told.  He lives with its realities every day, of course, and the story would not function without its setting, but this book lacks the political commentary of others in this genre.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  Without satirical or cynical overtones, the narrative here focuses on Stephen and his conflicts with the world, both internal and external.  The voices of his role models ring loudly in his ears even after the voices themselves are stilled.  His desire for change is obvious, but time and again he falls back on the familiar in a very believable way.  It becomes a very relatable coming-of-age story in a very possible, if somewhat grim, future.  But, alas, this genre has become so popular of late that The Eleventh Plague falls victim to its own uniqueness.  It doesn’t have the visceral impact of its fellows or the escapism provided by fantastically unrecognizable worlds.  By these expectations it falls short, and though Stephen is believable and relatable, as a coming-of-age story, it is not particularly unique.  It is well written and a solid story, but, overall, not exceedingly remarkable.