They have tried to squeeze us out, to stamp us into the past.
But we are still here.
And there are more of us every day.
Now an active member of the resistance, Lena has been transformed. The nascent rebellion that was under way in Pandemonium has ignited into an all-out revolution in Requiem, and Lena is at the center of the fight.
After rescuing Julian from a death sentence, Lena and her friends fled to the Wilds. But the Wilds are no longer a safe haven—pockets of rebellion have opened throughout the country, and the government cannot deny the existence of Invalids. Regulators now infiltrate the borderlands to stamp out the rebels, and as Lena navigates the increasingly dangerous terrain, her best friend, Hana, lives a safe, loveless life in Portland as the fiancée of the young mayor.
Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings.
Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it.
But we have chosen a different road.
And in the end, that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose.
We are even free to choose the wrong thing.
I was a bit iffy about this final installment in the trilogy (is it final? I think it is. This isn't a series I care about enough to follow *coughs*). I don't remember if I reviewed the book before this or not, but I remember thinking that it left off on a really horrible cliffhanger. The kind of cliffhanger that doesn't leave you thinking "I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE NEXT ONE" but "Wait, that's it? That wasn't an ending..." even for a series book. I felt like the first few chapters following Lena would've made for a better ending.
But I digress.
Uh anyway. The book this time is in two points of view: Lena's and her friend Hana's, so we do get to see the other side of things. Hana's POV was admittedly more interesting than Lena's many times, simply because Lena's is wandering around the wilds while Hana's has to do with her slowly realizing what's wrong with the Cure and rebelling from the inside even as she is supposed to be wed to the mayor of Portland. Hana is clever, and she has the power to do things that Lena can't, being out in the wilds and running from people who would kill them or Cure them. I think the only thing I found a bit off-putting about Hana's POV is that there... was a strangely high amount of focus on her breasts. Physical descriptions of her (what she's wearing, her sweating after riding her bike) usually included them. It just seemed odd to me.
Lena's POV wasn't completely boring; there was plenty of action at times, though to tell the truth, they didn't do very well in proving that love isn't a real disease that a doctor could diagnose you with. There was one or two instances of them mentioning that if they did such-and-such they'd be no better than the Officials that are after them, but it was a side note at best as far as I could tell. Love may not be a real disease, but they weren't the best people to show that one doesn't need the Cure to make them reasonable, well-functioning members of society.
One more thing that put me off was that they mentioned it had been seventy years since the Cure had become mandatory in America. That just doesn't seem long enough to me for this kind of thing. I would've liked to learn more about the people who declared love a legitimate brain disorder, but unless I'm forgetting something int he previous two books, we don't. It also mentions that America is the only country that uses the Cure, and that children are taught in school that other countries are gone, torn apart by the Deliria. Maybe I'm thinking about this too much, but not even a century seems like too short a time for such teachings to be so ingrained in a society.
So yeah. It's an okay enough book, but the world building and the ethics behind the main characters just seem off to me.
No comments:
Post a Comment