Friday, April 5, 2013

Review: WasteLand by Susan Kim and Laurence Klavan

-This Review May Contain Spoilers-

About WasteLand-
"Welcome to the wasteland
At fifteen,
the citizens of Prin marry.
At seventeen,
they reproduce.
And at nineteen,
they die.
Esther thinks there's more to life than toiling at the assignments—Harvesting, Gleaning, Excavating—day after day under the relentless sun, just hoping to make it to the next day.
She doesn't care that her best friend, a variant, is considered "the enemy." She doesn't care that Levi, who controls the Source, is the real enemy and might send his Taser boys after her if she makes one wrong move.
Then Caleb shows up. Could there be another way to fight for survival"


   Overall I feel pretty neutral for the most part about this book. All together it was an OK book, I didn't love it but I didn't totally hate it either. Luckily I got a free ARC from epicreads because I'd feel allot worse about the book had I paid for it. It's one of those books that’s worth the read (barely) but not the time or money.
   While I liked the overall premise the execution sucked for the most part, and there was quite a few things I hated.
   Firstly The Plot and World building-
   World building-wise there was none, seriously you find out absolutely nothing about anything. What was the apocalypse, What happened to the world to make it a Waste Land? Why is the rain deadly? What exactly are the variants? Why doesn't anyone live past 19? None of these questions are answered. Everything important is just casually mentioned not explained at all.
     The Characters -
   There is only one thing I hate more than love triangles and that's insta love, where two people who don't even know each other are all of a sudden in 'love', and in this book its worse than ever cause after all of 3 conversations over the span of 3 or 4 days they become 'partners' basically married and its completely normal they don't even stop to think about it and the next thing they do (which I refer to as the unmentionable act because I'm a prude and I admit it) I found really gross and slightly disturbing. But besides the insta love thing, I just found it incredibly hard to like and relate to the characters and the constantly switching POVs was confusing. Esther is a whiny bit** who doesn't understand why everyone hates her when she does nothing but complain about everything, she acts like a whiny spoiled little kid and then in the span of five sentences appears to "grow up", honestly I kinda hated her. Even the 'bad' guy is kinda lame and even though they do explain about why he is the way he is I found it stupid and petty and lame and he seemed kinda two-dimensional and too boring to be the villain .
Besides all that the plot was pretty predictable for the most part and kinda boring.
   I seem to have forgotten the few things I actually liked and cant remember if they ever existed. Overall it's not that good and kinda forgettable.
So, If you like books that are confusing, with no back-story, crappy characters and you like being bored to death, I totally recommend this book. But I wouldn't read it again and I probably wont read the others in this trilogy when they come out, partly because I didn't love this one and partly because I don't see how there can be another or what exactly it would be about.

Song of The Book-ment - This Is Hell by Elvis Costello

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