Dark Parties

I’m not sure I’m giving this a fair reading, because I’m so sick of dystopian fiction I could cry. But it read like yet another dystopian story. There’s a slight twist in that the main character is torn between the Boy and her best friend, rather than two boys. And yet, there wasn’t enough to really redeem this book for me. [Sept. 2011] ( )

Um...I'm not really sure what went on here.

OK, let me give you an overview of the book while I try to collect my thoughts. Neva only knows life inside the Protectosphere, which is a dome whose role is supposedly to protect people from the outside. Yet whenever anyone even mentions the outside, or thinks about life before the Protectosphere was in place, they go missing. Neva keeps a list of The Missing and determines to find out the truth. But she finds out more than she bargains for and not only that, falls in love with her best friend's boyfriend.

The beginning was...ok? If a little weird. And random. The book starts with a Dark Party - basically like a sleepover but in total darkness and minus the sleeping over. A meeting migh be a better way to put it. The idea is that 'we want to discover who we are without the burden of sight. It's easy to believe we are the same inside because we look so similar'. It's meant to be an act of rebellion against the goverment. Everyone looks pretty similar so the purpose of the darkness is to focus on who people are on the inside. The Dark Party also aims to set up a rebellion, although the majority of people who turned up leave when offered the choice, having no desire to go against the government. To be honest, it didn't make a whole load of sense. When you open a book you expect there to be a little scene setting, right? Just enough to get the reader settled in. Not Dark Parties. It gets straight to the point, though not particularly well. In the dark Neva also ends up kissing Braydon, the boyfriend of her best friend Sanna. It was pretty immediate and with no reason why.

I felt that the structure of the book was pretty disjointed; it didn't flow particularly well. It started to pick up a bit around halfway through, and there was a section near the end that definitely stood out from the rest in the way that it flowed quite nicely. And...the relationships between the characters were quite odd as well. There was no backstory, no build-up, no explanation. We got a bit about why Neva didn't love Ethan, her boyfriend, anymore, but no reason why she was attracted to Braydon. The relationship between Neva and Sanna was pretty on-off. And as soon as Neva got into some kind of trouble, two seconds later she was being rescued by her father. Neva herself was a bit of a mix. I didn't particularly warm to her - she was always nervous, or terrified, or betraying herself in some way, not to mention the fact that hello? Despite her awareness of how wrong it was to involve herself with Braydon, still she succumbed to the desire to be close to him. She couldn't even be careful when Sanna was nearby. But for all that, she was still courageous, determined to fight back even when Sanna briefly lost her rebellious spirit, although she could have been a bit less obvious. There was a little bit of stupidity on both their parts. Still, you have to respect her bravery.

Yeah, I'm aware that this review is a little disjointed itself. But...I'm just at a loss as to how to structure my thoughts more coherently with this one. It was very strange, for me at least. The premise for this looked great, so I found myself pretty disappointed. The ideas in this have so much potential. And I was expecting there to be a sequel, yet it seems that despite the author having some ideas, she has no plans for publication. It's a shame, because I think that another one would have been good and might have had some benefit. So...overall, I liked this book to a point. But I think that there were parts that were sorely under-developed, and would definitely have benefited from more explanation. ( )

Neva lives in the Homeland under the Protectosphere, an electrified dome that protects her people from the dangers outside—or does it? Natural resources are depleted, people around her are going missing, and the government is trying to convince her that having sex and creating the future generation is her civic duty. Neva and her friends try to find themselves in the sea of uniformity that is the Homeland, while dealing with conflicts in love and friendship. Through Neva the author tells a story of girl power and triumph over adversity while raising issues regarding sex, violation, and who makes decisions about the bodies of women. While the plot is definitely interesting the government in the Homeland is so backward-thinking that it is too unrealistic and difficult to believe. Similarly, there are twists involving almost all of the supporting characters and those are hard to swallow; it is as if nobody around Neva is who they seem but, conveniently, we do not find these things out until the very end. Overall, Dark Parties is a quick read with an intriguing plot, which covers issues that some young adults are dealing with themselves and some that they will hope they never face. ( )

Neva Adams lives under the Protectosphere. The government tells the inhabitants that there is nothing outside of it, that they are lucky to live there, and that they need protection from the outside world. Throughout Neva's life, people have suddenly gone missing and people around her adapt to the change, not acknowledging that a person is really gone. She and her friends decide to protest and show people that the Protectosphere is harmful with the shortages of just about everything from clothes to technology that hasn't been updated since the sphere was created. Their anti-sphere graffiti makes a huge splash and puts them under the scrutiny of the government. It just makes Neva more determined to find proof of all the lies and find out what really happened to the missing people. Will she and her friends escape the authorities and find the information they are after?

Dark Parties has been on my reading radar for a while and I finally picked it up on impulse at the library. It's a quick read and I liked the world for the most part. The Protectosphere, which is the most obvious and lame name ever, supposedly protects the people within from the dangers of the outside world. The government erases parts of their history and people from their society. They choose everyone's careers and allocates them to the most useful sectors, cutting out the arts entirely. To manipulate its citizens, the government purposely makes certain items scarce, such as birth control to encourage pregnancy to expand their numbers. There are all the trappings for a great dystopia are here. What confused me was the lack of new technology and inability to sustain the old technologies. It would improve the inhabitants quality of life and lure them into a false sense of security in addition to allowing the state to successfully spy on the people. Most of their cameras didn't even work and they relied on the presence of them to be intimidating. The lack of basic things like clothes just makes it seem that goods can't be produced almost at all to sustain the people under the dome. Maybe if people were happier and their needs better met, the state wouldn't have to make so many people disappear.

The characters frustrated me for the most part. Neva wasn't the best heroine. She had guts and nerve, but would do the dumbest things. She criticized her best friend for falling for a guy she barely knows and then does exactly the same thing with the same guy! She also seemed to take a lot of things at face value for someone trying to sift out the truth and lies from the world around her. The most annoying thing about her was that she was more concerned about the drama with a boy and her best friend than with the bigger picture where she could possibly die for her rebellion. Her best friend Sanna is a girl that will change herself and her convictions to please a boy. The boy in question, Braydon, is basically a cardboard cut out of a person with red cowboy boots like Ted Mosby from How I Met Your Mother: no character development, no real personality, and no development of any relationship with him. I would have loved this book at least 80% more without this useless, annoying romance and half-assed love triangle/square.

Dark Parties wasn't horrible, but I wouldn't call it good either. The dystopia kept my interest and was my favorite part, even if some if it seemed counterintuitive. The characters were mostly annoying and the romance distracted from the overall plot. I'm not sure if this is a series, but there has to be something exceptionally compelling in the blurb for the sequel to get me to read it. ( )

ISBN: 9781780620107
Publisher: Indigo
Pages: 352

Every tiny act of defiance adds up.
Maybe this one snowflake can start an avalanche.

Sixteen-year-old Neva has been trapped since birth. She was born and raised under the Protectosphere, in an isolated nation ruled by fear, lies, and xenophobia. A shield "protects" them from the outside world, but also locks the citizens inside. But there's nothing left on the outside, ever since the world collapsed from violent warfare. Or so the government says...
Neva and her best friend Sanna believe the government is lying and stage a "dark party" to recruit members for their underground rebellion. But as Neva begins to uncover the truth, she realizes she must question everything she's ever known, including the people she loves the most.

This book was kindly sent to me to review from Sara Grant. I really enjoyed Dark Parties! I liked reading about the concept of the Protectosphere and the effect it had on the society it contained. The idea that all of the citizens of Homeland were variations of one another and that any form of individuality was suppressed fascinated me! My favourite character was Neva, she stayed true to herself and didn't give up, even when her friends did. I really liked reading about the meaning behind Neva's name and how the snow theme was maintained throughout this book. Although I like the cover of Dark Parties, I would have preferred it to look less computer generated and for it to have represented more of the story within.

Available at Amazon.co.uk. ( )