Angela White (1)

I am one of the judges of team Space Girls for the SPSFC5 contest. This review is my personal opinion. Officially, it is still in the running for the contest, pending any official team announcements.

Status: Cut
Read: 30%

Continuing with my team's scout phase reads, we have yet another post apocalyptic dystopia entirely taking place in the US. Following tried & true plot formulas from countless zombie books, we have lots of people trying to flee, nuclear fallout, loss of order, sexual abuse and show more enslavement, paramilitary male thugs and a hidden government plot gone haywire.

Officially, this is not a zombie book. The dead stay dead and act more like props to exude an eerie vibe for increased tension. However, the book constantly alludes some dying survivors are sick with some mystery illness. There are hints the disease is spread from a chemical weapon and the only immune are people with hidden magic skills called 'the descendants'.

I cannot fully confirm if this is true or plot inconsistency because there's a chapter where Samantha (who has both a weather prediction and weak manipulator magic ability) visits a military facility where descendants were supposed to be evacuated. And apparently, the mystery gas wiped them out .

There is another major plot inconsistency where a military deserter named Kenn rescues his magic imbued son Charlie. The son's face ended up maimed during the chaos and he is touted to be blind. Somehow, Charlie has zero difficulty driving a car a few scenes later and any mention of his blindness ends up forgotten. Maybe the book explains psychic eyesight is his ability.

One recurrent issue I had with this book pertains to the fact there's over 8 POVs competing for their spotlight and half of them could have been removed without affecting the plot one bit. Some of these POVs only have 1 chapter within the first 30% and where 90% of the events are: thugs show up raining bullets like rabid yahoos, there's lots of dead bodies rotting everywhere, it is winter and cold. Things look dreary, but POV character escapes to scrape by scavenging for food another day.

There will be at least another handful of chapters with nearly identical escape from rabid male thug/paramilitary and vague mentions of latent magic. Hidden beneath the familiar raining bullets among corpses plot is a story where someone seems to be hunting down these humans with latent magic. It is clearly reminiscent of Xmen, where so far, the mutants we encounter so far are all the lowest powered ones whose paranormal abilities are not much of a threat. Some aspects of this book reminded me of The Stockades series by Shannon Reber.

I think with a major rewrite, this story would have been compelling. With so many shounen anime featuring underdog protagonists that magically are uber powerful, I like stories starring characters with weak abilities. By subverting the Mary Sue/Gary Stu trope, the inherent weakness offers the author plenty of avenues where the character needs to use wit. We do get one such chapter in this book's sample where Samantha predicts an upcoming blizzard and attempts an escape from her tormentors.

Another problem along with the excessive telling not showing is the rampant head hopping. When a book already has 8 POVs where half of them think quite similarly, head hopping makes it even harder to follow along the story. Within the 30%, the story hasn't really moved much at all. Readers could skip 17% of the book and not really miss much of a thing. Characters are still running away from miscreants and dodging corpses well into the 30%. Therefore, while I am certain readers that love their zombiepocalypse books will enjoy the dystopic elements in this book, this book is a cut from the contest for me. show less

I still love this series but again, the book seems bogged down with filler. I skipped through a lot of it, especially at the end. This book wasn't the page turner like the other books in this series. It didn't seem to flow in several pages. It's almost as if another writer took over.

It is very seldom that I choose not to bother finishing a book I have started.

This is a book I deleted a third of the way through.

I think White was trying for a MORE apocalyptic Hunger Games, with a side order of "feminist" dystopia. And I would say she succeeded, and that is not anything like a compliment.

The "science" behind all these changes is so spurious as to be ridiculous, and White waves it in our faces. I do not see any way the social order and structures described could possibly show more work for even a decade, not to mention hundreds of years. And while human men are apparently rare, that does not seem to stop anyone from killing them at random...

Besides making men rare- less than 10% of births- something unspecified has also infected women, basically turning them into a mash-up of the Hulk and a werewolf if the infected ones get even slightly irritated. This seems to be celebrated: PMS run amok? And- amazingly!- apparently good sex with a man "cures" them. Yep, White went there.

Candice, our female POV protagonist, has devoted herself to training for combat, so she can win the "Bachelor Battles" and thus save Daniel, her childhood BFF. This is the romance.

Now, the sex-switching here had serious potential. In Real Life, women are far more likely to get killed by our partners than by anyone else; imagining a world in which this was swapped has potential. I wish White had explored that more.

Also, the violence is exceedingly graphic and explicit. I got bored with blood spattering.

Not recommended. As I said above, I quit a third of the way through, because all the violence combined with the vacuous characters and the completely implausible world just made me tired. show less

Very well written

I love the writing style and the way she draws you into every story line. As usual some parts are a little grim, but the end of society isn't going to be candy canes and lollipops