I initially went into this book with an open mind. The concept itself sounded intriguing enough – a dystopian landscape filled with poisonous rainstorms that can kill you through the power of touch. It’s an undeniably original idea with a lot of potential. What would we all do if all water was suddenly rendered toxic, to the extent that we couldn’t even let it come into contact with our skin, let alone drink it? In this sense I was expecting something creative, daring, and maybe even a little disturbing.
Oh, it was disturbing, alright. Unfortunately, it was for all the wrong reasons.
I must first note that the edition I read was an uncorrected proof copy, so what was in my version might not necessarily be in the final cut. Regardless, I feel compelled to express my thoughts on what has been put in front of me. Strap yourselves in, folks. We’re in for a bumpy ride.
This book is terrible. This is genuinely one of the worst YA novels I’ve ever read. I know I say that about every book I review, but I really mean it this time. In the end, I decided it wasn’t quite as bad as Marked for two reasons:
-
There is an actual semblance of a plot, even though the ending renders it totally irrelevant.
-
The protagonist doesn’t insult any minorities (this doesn’t make her any less of a despicable human being, but I’ll get to that later).
It still came uncomfortably close, though.
So without further ado, let’s start from the beginning (all aboard the spoiler/swearing train):
First of all, we have our prologue and, to be honest, I didn’t think it was that bad. We get our first exposure to Ruby’s voice and, while it’s slightly grating, it’s still tolerable. The author is at least attempting to do something interesting with the book’s style. The voice is very distinctive, which is very much accentuated by experimenting with morphology through shifts in font size and the emboldening of words. Ruby’s personality is also very clear cut, and she ends up coming across as, dare I say it, kind of likeable in a feisty, extroverted kind of way. So the prologue was pretty decent. I remember thinking to myself, “Phew, that wasn’t so bad.”
Then we get to chapter one. I don’t even know where to start.
We are met with this first sentence:
I was sitting in a hot tub in my underwear snogging Caspar McCloud.
First of all, there is no way that Caspar McCloud is a real name.
And secondly, who uses the word ‘snogging’ anymore? It’s one of those words that makes me cringe whenever I have to read it aloud in my head, much like the word ‘moist’ or ‘phlegm’. Now I wouldn’t describe myself as being ‘down with the yoof’ in any respect, but to me, the word ‘snog’ feels very much like a term of the early to mid noughties, and not something that would be used unironically in 2014. In spite of this, this word and its other derivations are used not once, not twice , but eight times. It’s even used as an adjective at one point, if you can even imagine what that looks like.
This was a large problem I had with the book, a problem that is not necessarily limited to just this author, but is particular apparent in this work. At points this sounded very much like a middle aged woman trying to sound like a teenager.
[…] If there’s one thing I’ve learned the hard way from going on ‘social media’ and that, it’s that you sometimes have to just hang on for one second before you blast off some kind of devastating response to rudeness and cheekery from someone you don’t really know all that well […]
At times it felt like I had been magically transported to the seventies.
[…] She’d just started hanging out with us lately – even more lately than Caspar, who’d been transferred to our school from the arty hippy school, and was cool and wild […].
This is also where the writing starts to become a little sloppy, sometimes to the extent that you have little to no idea of what’s just been said, but really can’t be bothered to go back and re-read it.
[…] [Lee] came up and asked Saskia where the gin had gone (I told you that punch was lethal) and Saskia said she didn’t know and Lee said she thought she’d seen her with it and Saskia said she hadn’t seen it and Lee said maybe she could just come and help her look for it and Saskia, who SO knew all along what Lee was trying to do, sighed this enormous bored sigh and stood up and climbed out of the tub with her chest practically in Caspar’s face and then turned to me and said – “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
O_O
You could argue that this is for stylistic reasons, but when your readers are skimming over large passages because they can’t be bothered to wade through walls of text, that’s a huge problem.
The sad thing is that there’s some pieces of really nice writing and imagery buried beneath this incoherent mess.
My scream died in the air; it died and joined all the other screams. They live like ghosts, like echoes in the minds of the living.
I get that this is supposed to be written in an informal style, but a few more flourishes like that would have really added to the apocalyptic feel of the novel and brought a depth and emotion to the story that just wasn’t there.
The supporting characters were well written and, for the most part, I found their motives to be pretty sound and sensible. However, there were a couple of instances that slightly puzzled me. For example, Ruby is at a friend’s house when the news hits that the rain is toxic and that it will quite literally burn your skin off if you come into any contact with it. As Ruby and her friends are hungover from all their shenanigans, her friend’s parents decide to give them tap water to help them wake up a bit.
Isn’t it kind of common sense that if the rainwater is infected, then tap water is automatically infected as well? It’s not like you just turn the faucet and water appears magically from thin air; it has to come from somewhere. I could maybe understand the teenagers making that mistake, but two fully grown adults? Hmm.
Having said that, while the writing was disappointing, that wasn’t my main problem with the novel. That honour lies with Ruby herself.
I think this quotation from chapter one pretty much sums up my feelings towards her:
See for days there’d been stuff on the news about some new kind of epidemic. Outbreaks in Africa, in South America. Then reports from Russia. Some kind of new disease thing… but- well, it wasn’t here, was it?
Now in YA fiction there tends to be an archetype for female protagonists. They’re intelligent (or at least in a self-proclaimed sense), humble, pretty but not overly so, and generally the underdog of the story. And more often than not, there’s a reason for that. The shallow and obnoxious variety of teenager just isn’t interesting and/or relatable enough to sustain an entire story. Sure, there are exceptions to this rule, but it’s generally very hard to pull off.
To put it mildly, Ruby is an apathetic spoilt brat who for the most part only cares about others when it suits her. She is also a fucking idiot, and is quite proud of this fact.
In short, I wanted Katniss Everdeen. I got Ja’mie King instead.
(Seriously, imagining Ruby with her voice makes the book so much better).
And for those of you saying that Ruby is a teenager and that teenagers have a tendency to be self absorbed and overreact, I really think you’re underestimating this book’s target audience. I’m no longer a teenager, but to me the attempt to come across as a teenager seemed very patronising. Ruby doesn’t even know who the prime minister of her own country is, and her justification for this is of the ‘lol, politics is boring, amirite?’ variety. I’m sure the majority of 15 year olds find politics boring, but any 15 year old with half a brain cell knows who the leader of their own fucking country is. Quite frankly, if I’d read this as a teenager, I think I’d feel insulted.
Ruby is an absolute cow to her stepfather, Simon, who really only wants her to be safe. When she returns home from her friend’s house, she’s infected, because she kissed some guy who had been out in the rain, even when she was warned not to, because she’s a moron. Simon quarantines her in the living room for, like, one night, because that’s what the emergency broadcasts advised him to do, and he just wants to protect the rest of their family. Does Ruby try to listen to him, or even attempt to put forward her case in a pleading yet rational manner? Nope, she throws a hissy fit straight off the bat.
Try reading this and see if you blame her stepdad for locking her up:
Ka-boom. I snapped the stupid walking-stick thing Simon took on country rambles. It was hard work snapping it but I was ultimately doing him a favour because it made him look like an OAP and a nerd. Then I saw his binoculars. His new binoculars. His nerdish pride and joy. Simon liked to watch birds, you see. Can you imagine anything more deeply boring?
He should have let her starve.
As I see it, the only way that Ruby managed to survive for so long is through the sheer goodwill of other people.
There’s Simon, who was by far the best character in the book. When he died, I was genuinely sad, not just because he was a pillar of logic in a sea of stupidity, but because it meant I was all alone with Ruby. Then Darius came along and alleviated my burden. Now by this point Ruby’s characterisation has started to improve (that isn’t really saying much, but I’ll take what I can get), but even so she doesn’t seem to share my appreciation of Darius, and still prefers to treat him like something stuck to the bottom of her shoe. Early on in the book, he really helps her out and even offers her some of his supplies, and then she has the nerve to say this:
“Bye!” I shouted, which I thought was very charitable of me, considering. Charitable, and also a further sign of how serious the situation was: girls like me don’t even acknowledge the existence of boys like Darius Spratt. It’s a basic law of nature.
Quite frankly, if I were Simon or Darius, I would have just shoved her face first into a puddle and gotten on with my life.
As I said before, the ending rendered the entire plot completely redundant. She basically just ends up back where she started, except everyone is now dead. To me, that seems like a bit of a step backwards, wouldn’t you say?
There’s a quote from the TV show ‘The Thick of It’ that I think really encapsulates my experience of reading this book:
“This is like The Shawshank Redemption, only with more tunnelling through shit and less fucking redemption.”
In conclusion, this book was terrible and I will not be reading the sequels.
YA ATROCITIES 