The Jewel by Amy Ewing

This novel is the first of a trilogy that features a world of conflict between classes. With a romance brewing and desires to be more than your job developing, you can't help but root for the characters.

In a world where the royals are unable to carry babies, surrogates exist to continue the royal line. Not just any woman will do, though. Surrogates are special girls who have a power known as Auguries. There are three auguries - the power to change shape, color, and make things grow. Violet is a surrogate.When she was deemed to have these powers, she was removed from her house and raised in a holding facility. She has now reached her full potential and has been put up for auction for one of the royal houses to purchase. Once purchased, Violet becomes nothing more than the surrogate and her owner has big plans for her because times are changing and people are desperate to make their mark. While Violet may be nothing to her owner, she meets Ash, another person who is nothing more than the job he does. Despite the fact that their relationship is forbidden, together they find connections and life and desires that their positions try to strip away. At the same time, however, Violet meets a man who wants to save her from her life as a surrogate in an effort to start a rebellion. Going with him is not only risky, but it means saying goodbye to Ash. Violet needs to decide what is most important, especially when she learns more about future plans for surrogates. 

I picked up this novel because I enjoyed reading The Selection and felt this book had a similar vibe. It is definitely different (surrogates vs dating game), but there are a number of elements that are similar and classic to dystopian novels (at times I felt the novel was reminiscent of The Hunger Games, especially at the beginning - Lucien reminded me of Cinna). There are the different levels of society with The Jewel being the center and royalty, the Bank still being wealthy, down to the Smoke, Farm, and the lowest of low - the Marsh. Violet's rights are completely stripped away and she's put on display for the ruling class. Then, through it all, a rebellion is slowly brewing. You really feel for Violet and Ash. They're nothing more than toys to serve a purpose for the royalty and you want them to reach their full potential as people. It's easy to see the injustice in everything, especially when it doesn't have to be that way. 

The novel might be a little bit slow to get going - especially setting up this new world and way of life - but it is definitely worth the payout. I know that I'm anxiously awaiting the sequel.
MMK

Graduation Day - Joelle Charbonneau

Cia finds out the truth about The Testing, and realizes the rebellion isn't what she was lead to believe.  She heads to meet with President Collindar. Cia tells the president what she knows about about the rebellion.  The president believes Cia even when she thought the president wouldn't.  President Collindar gives Cia a list of twelve names including, Symon, the rebel leader.  The names include Dr. Barnes, the head of The Testing, and his close associates.  At first Cia thinks the president is going to eliminate the names on the list.  When she tells Cia she wants her to eliminate them, Cia can't fathom it.  The president tells her that she is best one to do this and trust no one, echoing the words her father told her.  As Cia thinks things over she knows she can't do this alone.  As officials search every building on campus for a missing student, Cia makes of list of people she can trust to carry out the mission.  When she runs into Tomas she brings him up to speed on what the president wants her to do.  She knows Tomas is with her, and decides to make up tests for the others.  If they pass then they can be trusted.  She puts a tracking device on Ian's bag, and Stacia is on board from the get go.  They make a fake radio to test Raffe.  If he "listens" to it the radio will explode.  She gives it to Raffe after class telling him not to listen to the recording.  When she meets up with Raffe later Cia shows him the list and he marks five names off.  Those five want The Testing to end as much as they do.  Dr. Barnes, his father, and the others have to die.  He gives back the radio and has passed Cia's test.  Cia, Tomas, Stacia, and Raffe meet at the library to discuss what needs to be done.  When Will and Enzo interrupt their meeting Cia and Raffe go walk around campus to find a good escape point.  When they head back to the dorm there is an explosion and smoke coming from Cia's room.  Inside she finds Enzo covered in burns from the radio.  As officials come to investigate Raffe helps Cia escape.  She heads an abandoned house in Tsou City to wait for Tomas, Stacia, and Raffe.  Will they be able to carry out the assassinations and end The Testing, or will Dr. Barnes and Symon take over the government and continue The Testing?

I have enjoyed this series and I loved how the final book wrapped everything up.  The theme of trust no one has been a constant through out the series.  As Cia finds out no matter what you are given some tasks are to great to do on your own.  You have to trust at least one other person to help you out.  Some that you think can be trusted may betray you, but that's how life is.  Not everyone can be trusted.  If everyone trusted everyone else I think we would have more of an utopian society.  Actions speak louder than words and those actions are what we use to decide who to trust. 

T.B.
8/12/14

The Testing - Joelle Charbonneau

      The world is trying to rebuild after The Seven Stages War.  Most major cities like Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles have been decimated.  The buildings and houses are in ruins, and the water is so contaminated that it cannot be purified.  Malencia Vale, Cia to her family and friends, lives in Five Lakes a small colony.  Each year the government of the United Commonwealth evaluates the scores of all the graduates.  The highest ones are chosen and taken to the Testing Center where they are put through four different tests.  Only twenty make it to The University each year.  This year graduation day comes and goes with no word from a Tosu City official.  Cia is worried because she knows she did well enough to get selected.  The day after graduation Cia and three others are told they have been selected to go through the testing.  They leave the following morning.  Cia breaks the news to her family.  Her dad, who also went through the testing, tells her about nightmares he's had about people he may have known during The Testing.  He tells her not to trust anyone including Tomas, her closest friend, who is also going for The Testing.  The four of them are some of the last testing candidates to arrive, and all the others are buzzing about the four from Five Lakes.  Five Lakes hasn't had a testing candidate, let alone four, in over ten years. 

      Everyone is divided up and the testing begins.  Phase one tests their knowledge of History, Math, Reading and Language, and Science.  Some candidates don't come back after phase one, including Cia's roommate Ryme, who kills herself.  Phase two has boxes brought in and all the candidates in the group are to complete one box and then start a new one.  They are to complete as many as they can in the time given.  Several more candidates don't return after phase two.  Phase three tests how well the candidates work together in groups.  After this test the remaining candidates are told whether they pass or not.  Out of the initial one hundred and eight candidates only fifty-nine remain after three phases of testing.  The fourth phase is the longest and difficult.  The candidates will be put in an area that hasn't been revitalized and travel back to Tosu City.  The starting point of this journey is Chicago.  Cia and everyone else remaining have to travel 700 miles to just outside of Topeka, Kansas.  This phase will test every strength and weakness Cia and all the other candidates have.  This phase is the true test to see who is fit to go on to the university and then become leaders of the world. 

     I loved this book.  After I finished reading it, especially the last chapter, I had chills running down my spine.  When I added this book on Goodreads, I glanced at the first few reviews and people were saying The Testing was The Hunger Games rehashed.  While I did see some similarities to The Hunger Games, this book is it's own story.  Fans of The Hunger Games and other dystopian novels will enjoy this book.  There is a sequel coming out in January of 2014 called Independent Study.  I'll be eagerly awaiting the sequel. 

T.B.
6/22/13

The Culling: The Torch Keeper Book One - Steven Dos Santos

The Establishment has a recruitment day each year.  Five "lucky" people are chosen and they face a series of tests with one person coming out the victor.  Each person has two incentive lives hanging in the balance during the tests.  If they fail then the incentives are killed.  The last one standing gets to join the Imposer task force.  For Lucian, recruitment day is the way he can protect his four year old brother.  Lucian tries to get caught on purpose during curfew, but runs into an old school mate Digory.  Digory is working for the resistance and tries to get Lucian to join the rebellion.  As they run from the Imposers, Digory escapes and Lucian is caught.  Lucian is taken to see the Prefect, who happens to be his Uncle.  Cassius assures Lucian that he and Cole will be fine.  Cassius transports Cole and Mrs. Bledsoe, their surrogate mother, to the city so they can watch the ceremony from his private box.  When the fifth recruit kills herself, Cassius names Lucian as the fifth recruit.  Cassius uses the reason that his own flesh and blood is being corrupted by the resistance and an example will be made.  The recruits are isolated from each other on a boat and taken to an island to begin their training.  Their days are filled with calisthenics, fighting techniques, map reading, land navigation, compass use, first aid training, and basic combat training.  When the five are taken in the middle of the night they are told to put their training to good use.  Their mission is to make it to the radio tower in one piece.  Everyone makes it to the radio tower to pass phase one of their training.  Phase two and phase three are even more grueling.  Through out all of this Lucian finds himself falling in love with Digory.  When graduation day approaches it is all but a happy day for Lucian and Digory.  Everyone sees their families but Lucian.  He shares an emotional moment with Digory before the ceremony begins.  During the ceremony it is reviled that Mrs. Bledsoe has died leaving Lucian with one incentive, his brother Cole.  Digory also has one incentive, his husband.  It is decreed that Digory and Lucian incentives will serve as the others incentives during the trials.  The trials are where loved ones will be sacrificed and friendships that existed during the earlier phases of training will be no more.  Only one can walk away with their life and the lives of their incentives. 

I really enjoyed this book.  As the story progressed I wanted everyone, both the recruits and their incentives, to survive.  Of course their can only be one recruit and their incentives who survive.  The author made you care for all the characters, even when they died.  I think there might be one or two characters who "died" that will probably pop up in the next book of the series. 

T.B.
6/11/13

Legend by Marie Lu

This is another first book in a teen dystopia series.  Day is a loner rebel who the current government wants captured and executed.  He is causing so much trouble.  June is a prodigy about Day's age who is highly trained by the government as a spy, assassin guard etc.  She loves to go off on her own to challenge herself, something government training cannot do, she is so advanced.  Their worlds collide when Day pulls off a heist of plague medicine in which June's beloved brother is killed.  Plague pops up in one poor sector or another with no real sense as to why.  Victims' doors are marked and the medical police cart them away.  Occasionally a different sort of mark is placed on a door, though no one knows the significance.  It is known that there is cure and prevention for plague but only wealthy people have access to it.  There are other horrific things this government is doing.  Kids who fail their training trials at aged ten are theoretically sent to labor camps and are never seen again.  June is assigned the task of finding Day and bringing him in.  She is highly motivated to do so by the loss of her brother.  When she succeeds, she is already seeing things a bit differently.  She even seems to have fallen in love with Day.  His capture results in the death of his mother and the capture of his brothers as well.  Day's execution time is set.  But before then, June has discovered the truth about her brother's death, the plague and other things the government is doing and sets out to free Day and his brothers instead.  At story's end Day is freed, one of his brother's is dead, June has become a rebel and there is still Day's younger brother to rescue.  This book just sets up the series.  Anyone reading this will really want to read the next books.  Think about the Nazi regime and their labor camps and other stuff that regime did.  I suspect that this is where the story is going - though I will have to find out along with everyone else.  Its an easy enough read, I recommend it.
JDW

Starters by Lissa Price

In Nancy Farmer's House of the Scorpion adults, especially one elderly person who wishes to live forever, clones himself and uses the clones for replacement body parts. Most of the clones are believed to be brainless. In Lissa Price's book microchips implanted in teens known as starters and very elderly folks known as enders live a sort of virtual life through body sharing. Enders can perhaps even take over the body of the young person forever. The teen would never be allowed to experience his/her own life and grow up. "The Old Man" Prime Destinations' ceo has worked out the how, does the recruiting of volunteer starters, surgeries, and the connections and monitoring. Its a very secret organization for very wealthy enders. It prefers to use unclaimed minors. These are teens with no relatives so they won't be missed should the ender decide to keep a body forever. Only, starters, with relatives, want the makeover plastic surgeries that make volunteers beautiful and sneak into the program. Some have disappeared. Callie enters the program for the promised money that will help her get medicine and food for her and her little brother. They are unclaimed minors who have been squatting in various abandoned buildings and running from marshalls. Callie knows just how awful the institutions in which captured kids are housed. She has seen the kids being driven to slave labor in mines and fields and so on. All of this is happening because of a war in which biological weapons were used on America. This caused all adults roughly under the age of 90 to perish, leaving only elderly and kids, many of whom had no known elderly relatives. Helena,the ender who chooses Callie's body has a mission, to find her missing granddaughter. She has the microchips altered to allow her to assassinate the originator of the horrible body sharing program and end it before more kids give up their lives to enders. Something goes oddly wrong and Callie and Helena can communicate with each other in Callie's head. Callie becomes convinced that Helena is right about needing to stop the program just as her little brother disappears. She is on a mission to both find her brother and bring down Prime Destinations. This makes the story not just dystopia but also a mystery story. Its hard to understand how Callie chose who to trust. Also, with all the tracking going on, its hard to understand her continued use of Helena's car and home even after Helena disappears and is presumed dead. Situations had to be carefully set up to make this story work. But its a fast and mostly exciting read with a possibility of a sequel.

The Eleventh Plague By Jeff Hirsch

This novel is considered fiction, but to me the novel is very real, and true to what could occur one day. The novel considers the Eleventh plague a sickness like a deathly strain of influenza. The novel depicts a world that has nose-dived into a futuristic nightmare. Stephen Quinn one of the main personalities of the novel, struggles to define his rules of survival. Fifteen year old Stephen only knows the life of a salvage. Salvagers are people searching for materials they could trade to others for money to survive. Stephen's family was one of the few that survived these times.
Tragedy fell on Stephen, when his grandfather died, and his father became comatose after an accident. Stephen returns to Settler's Landing, which is a community that is good, and he has been to before. This visit he meets a girl Jenny who plays a main personality in the novel. Jenny is strong, mischievous, and becomes a good friend of Stephen's. Stephen, and Jenny went to see if his house existed after so much turmoil . Stephen thought his house felt like a museum . By that I mean silent, and eerie. No people, and Stephen wanted to hear his grandpa's voice, or his dad's.
I liked the novel very much.

LRD/11/15/11

Delirium by Lauren Oliver

I had a hard time believing in this story. Portland Maine has become a small dictatorship. It is surrounded by electrified fences. It has crypts for permanent enemies of the state. It has rules regarding what you can and cannot read, watch on tv, see in plays, etc. Religion is really the indoctrination of people with the values of the state. And, romantic love is called a virus which is cured once a person passes his/her seventeenth birthday, by brain surgery, which sometimes goes badly wrong and sometimes doesn't work. After that, people are passively, accepting of their fates. They are assigned jobs, they are assigned spouses, they are told how many children they are allowed to have. There are only hints of how/why this happened. A person can sort of understand that if one grew up in this restricted society, knew nothing else then this would all seem normal. Understanding why adults who apparently lived at the time of whatever happened believe in this system is harder to understand. Except rumors abound about invalids (uncured) living in the wilds outside the fence. Folks are aware that there is a world across the ocean they know nothing about, and don't care since the cure. There are resistors. Lena, just before her cure, learns that romantic love has a lot to recommend itself. Lena goes to illicit concerts with music not controlled by the state. Lena even gets to visit the wilds with her love, Alex, a resistor. Of course eventually they get caught, pretty much everyone does. There are so many safeguards against escape such as the fences, constant violent raids and whatnot that it would be virtually impossible not to. In fact, this situation seems virtually hopeless as far escape or a future of freedom of choice and of true love. Reminiscent of Lowry's The Giver which is less violent and more hopeful. JDW7/28

THOSE THAT WAKE by Jesse Karp

There has been an increase in certain activities in one area of the world that is leading to the people either appearing vacant headed (zombie like) or becoming quite violent. The phenomenon is spreading. A few older teens, a school teacher, a researcher who has come to the area to study the phenomenon and its meaning, have seemingly not been affected. One went home from school, celled her traveling parents only to discover they no longer knew she existed, when she returned to school to document her existence, all evidence had vanished as if it never was. All these folks eventually find out that their lives have been expunged. They no longer have lives. They meet each other when they find themselves in some sort of surreal forested area with an assassin. No matter where they go, the end up back where they started.
All but one escapes back into the changed real world after the assassin is eliminated. They embark on a journey to get their lives back. In the end, it appears that at least two have done so, but perhaps only appears. What exactly is going on here, well it feels like it could really happen, or be happening right now. There is a lot to think about in this unusual futuristic, dystopic, scary novel. I enjoyed it a lot. A thoughtful teen reader should as well.