Book Review: Article 5 by Kristen Simmons

Pros: protagonist shows real growth at the end of the book, spunky heroine

Cons: heroine is surprisingly naive given her age and circumstances, willful misunderstandings between Ember and Chase that complicate their interactions and romance, minimal worldbuilding

For Parents: no swearing, no sexual content, some violence (corporal punishment, off stage executions)

Ember's world is shattered when her mother is arrested on an Article 5 violation, putting Ember into the custody of the state.  She is desperate to escape her new home, reform school, and help her mother at all costs.  Meanwhile she wonders at the betrayal of her closest friend, and first love, Chase, who was drafted into the army and was one of the arresting officers who took her mother away.

While I imagine teens will love Ember, she's feisty and won't back down from defending her rights, most adults will find her attitude tiresome.  Yes, you can argue that she's doing the right thing by fighting back, but she's not doing the SMART thing.  The smart thing at the reform school would have been to lay low and find out how things work before planning an escape attempt.  Instead she draws attention to herself right away, so she's watched more carefully - making it harder to escape and bringing down draconian punishments on herself.

Having said that, the ending is that much better as you finally see her realize that there's a time to fight and a time to watch and plan.  And while her plan comes off better than I believe it would have in real life, I felt proud of Ember for growing up and learning this very important lesson.

Part of her rebelliousness shows in her relationship with Chase.  Both characters complicate their interactions and their own feelings by willfully misrepresenting their circumstances (Chase lying about how he was treated in the army for example).  I understood why Chase didn't tell her what happened to her mother but I was amazed that she didn't figure it out.  And a lot of Ember's actions relied on spur of the moment decisions based on fear rather than planned actions.

Finally, Ember is very clueless about her world, and that shows up in the minor worldbuilding.  We're told of the war that has allowed the President to corrupt the US using the Statues of Morality, but we aren't told who the war was against or why it was fought, nor do we learn if there was opposition to the Statues, etc., etc..   

The ending made the book worth reading, but I suspect many adults will not make it that far.  This is one for teens - and they'll love it. 

Cool New YA Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic Novels

While I was looking for the youtube videos for yesterday's post, I saw this book trailer as one of the pre-video ads.  Intrigued, I looked up the book and it sounds pretty awesome.  The book is Starters by Lissa Price, out March 13th.

HER WORLD IS CHANGED FOREVER

Callie lost her parents when the Spore Wars wiped out everyone between the ages of twenty and sixty. She and her little brother, Tyler, go on the run, living as squatters with their friend Michael and fighting off renegades who would kill them for a cookie. Callie's only hope is Prime Destinations, a disturbing place in Beverly Hills run by a mysterious figure known as the Old Man.

He hires teens to rent their bodies to Enders—seniors who want to be young again. Callie, desperate for the money that will keep her, Tyler, and Michael alive, agrees to be a donor. But the neurochip they place in Callie's head malfunctions and she wakes up in the life of her renter, living in her mansion, driving her cars, and going out with a senator's grandson. It feels almost like a fairy tale, until Callie discovers that her renter intends to do more than party—and that Prime Destinations' plans are more evil than Callie could ever have imagined. . . .

Another book I've been waiting to read that has a great book trailer is Dan Wells's Partials.

The human race is all but extinct after a war with Partials, engineered organic beings identical to humans, has decimated the population. Reduced to only tens of thousands by RM, a weaponized virus to which only a fraction of humanity is immune, the survivors in North America have huddled together on Long Island while the Partials have mysteriously retreated. The threat of the Partials is still imminent, but, worse, no baby has been born immune to RM in more than a decade. Our time is running out.

Kira, a sixteen-year-old medic-in-training, is on the front lines of this battle, seeing RM ravage the community while mandatory pregnancy laws have pushed what's left of humanity to the brink of civil war, and she's not content to stand by and watch. But as she makes a desperate decision to save the last of her race, she will find that the survival of humans and Partials alike rests in her attempts to uncover the connections between them, connections that humanity has forgotten, or perhaps never even knew were there.

Article 5, by Kristen Simmons, is sitting by my chair, waiting for me to finish my current book so I can pick it up.

New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., have been abandoned.

The Bill of Rights has been revoked, and replaced with the Moral Statutes.

There are no more police-instead, there are soldiers. There are no more fines for bad behavior-instead, there are arrests, trials, and maybe worse. People who get arrested usually don''t come back.

Seventeen-year-old Ember Miller is old enough to remember that things weren't always this way. Living with her rebellious single mother, it's hard for her to forget that people weren't always arrested for reading the wrong books or staying out after dark. It's hard to forget that life in the United States used to be different.

Ember has perfected the art of keeping a low profile. She knows how to get the things she needs, like food stamps and hand-me-down clothes, and how to pass the random home inspections by the military. Her life is as close to peaceful as circumstances allow.

That is, until her mother is arrested for noncompliance with Article 5 of the Moral Statutes. And one of the arresting officers is none other than Chase Jennings…the only boy Ember has ever loved.

And last but not least is Above by Leah Bobet.

Matthew has always lived in Safe, a community hidden far beneath the pipes and tunnels of the city Above. The residents fled to Safe years before to escape the Whitecoats and their cruel experiments, and now Matthew is responsible for both the keeping of Safe's stories and for Ariel-a golden-haired shapeshifter, and the most beautiful girl he's ever seen.

But one horrifying night, an old enemy murders Safe's founder, Atticus, and the community is taken over by an army of shadows. Only Matthew, Ariel, and a handful of friends escape Above. Now they not only have to survive in a sunlit world they barely know, but they must unravel the mystery of the shadows'' fury and Atticus's death. It's up to Matthew to find a way to remake Safe-not just for himself and his family, but for Ariel, who''s again faced with the life she fled, and who needs him more than ever before.

Too many books to read, too little time...