Wednesday, January 8, 2014

THE TESTING, by Joelle Charbonneau

The story: Cia has spent her life dreaming of going to the University, where the best and brightest minds work to change the future in a pretty crummy post-apocalyptic present. But she never dreamed she'd have to kill someone to do it. When the 17-year-old receives the news that she's been chosen for The Testing, everyone should be ecstatic, and everyone is--except the one person who's actually done it: her father. He sends her off to face the challenge of her life with a single sentence of warning...trust no one. And from the time that the first contestant dies, Cia comes to realize the value of her father's advice. Now she not only has to figure out how to pass the tests...but also whether she can make an exception to her father's rule. Tomas has been a kind, gentle presence her whole life...but now he's a fellow competitor, and if he shows compassion to her, he could end up dead too. Live, love, and...die?

 June Cleaver's ratings: Language: PG; Nudity: G; Sexual Content: G Substance Abuse: PG; Violence: R; GLBT content: G; Magic & the occult: G; Adult Themes: PG-13 (the idea of teens' being willing to kill other teens in order to survive themselves); Overall rating: PG-13.

 
Liz's comments: I have to admit that, after five years of reading lots of dystopian/post-apocalyptic fiction, I'm getting kind of tired of it. It's always so uniformly dire, everyone is always so ready to use violence to stay alive, and after a while it all starts to sound the same (especially as the plot themes cycle around again, as they do here). So while I probably would have given this story four stars if I'd read it a couple of years ago, dystopian inflation is at work (plus, it was hard to suspend disbelief that a society so short of population would kill 85% of its best-and-brightest every year instead of sending them a polite rejection letter and reassigning them). Maybe that will be brought up in book 2...we'll see if I make it that far).
Posted by at
Labels: ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)