A friend of mine has mentioned this book several times, but--thinking she was talking about that movie where they covered a bunch of Beatles tunes and this was the novelization of that or something--I had no interest in it at all. I apologize to everyone shaking their head at me now, and I admit I was very wrong.
When her parents volunteer to be cryognically frozen for 300 years and wake up on a new planet, Amy decides to be frozen along with them instead of living without them. However, someone wakes her up early, and she finds that the people who stayed awake during the voyage and formed a generational ship have also formed a little dystopia full of secrets and lies. She uncovers the ship's many secrets with Elder, the teenage boy destined to be the ship's next leader.
This book has all the dystopian tropes. All of them. And they are all Plot Twists.
What happens to the old people who go up the the fourth floor when they get too old and then are never heard from again?
You're right! That's what happens.
Several things crop up, where my first response is "that's not how science works." Like how the engine runs on uranium, and it's all all good because once they use the uranium, they can re-enrich it back into usable uranium. "That's not how uranium works," I say, and assume that the author is taking liberties with radiation because no one ever bothers to understand radiation. But then, it turns out I was right. That's not how uranium works and the engine is losing efficiency*. What you've been told is a lie! Plot Twist!
In retrospect, this is actually a clever use of the genre. The story used my expectation and my underestimation to hide twists in plain sight. It made pseudo-plot-twists where I saw them coming but then second guessed myself and then was surprised.
The novel says some pretty uncomfortable things about race and mental illness. The leader of the ship insists that "The first cause of discord is difference" and therefore everyone on board is "mono-ethnic."** When Amy shows up, she's simultaneously feared, reviled, and fetishized. Her differences cause disruption and the leader is proved to be right. There's of course a lot more to it than that, but it all keeps getting simplified down to how she has different colored hair than everyone else.
Then there is a perpetuation of the stigma that it's shameful to take drugs for mental illness, then the idea that if you're mentally ill you're inherently different from normal people and will never be like them, and then to top it all off there's the favorite "I'm not crazy, everyone else is crazy, and they're keeping all the not crazy people in a mental hospital."
I did like the description of the freezing process. It's terrifying and gripping, and it was a great start. The story just didn't maintain that level of excitement.
Let's end this review with this quote, which can give you an idea of what this book is like: cliché and cringe worthy.
"He doesn't like 'disturbances,'" I tell Amy. "He doesn't like anyone to be different at all. Difference, he says, is the first cause of discord."
"He sounds like a regular Hitler to me," Amy mutters. I wonder what she means by that. Eldest has always taught me that Hitler was a wise, cultured leader for his people. Maybe that's what she means: Eldest is a strong leader, like Hitler was. The turn of phrase is unusual, another difference between us, another difference I'm sure Eldest would hate.
*Still wrong about inertia tho
**Really? That's weird. How did they manage that? They say it's because over generations they all melded together into one race, but could that really happen on this time scale? Did they start out only sending one ethnicity into space? Did they kill everybody else? Maybe it's a Plot Twist!
***
Next week: The Unexpected Everything, contemporary YA by Morgan Matson.
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