I knew I wasn’t just going to fall in love with Maxon overnight. I knew my heart wouldn’t let me. But I suddenly found myself in a place where that was something I might want.

See, this is actually pretty sweet.  It’s a reasonable, slow build up of romance which acknowledges that falling in love is a complex process that goes beyond “boom, and now you are the beginning and end of my life, NEVER LEAVE ME.”  As far as teenage romance in books goes, theirs isn’t even all that fucked up, just plagued by occasional bouts of stupidity that are largely unrelated to the actual romantic feelings.

Really, this author should have just stuck to writing about teenagers getting warm, squishy feelings.

So, America keeps the news of her kissytime to herself and thinks warms thoughts about it.  Until a few days later, when one of the other girls announces that she got kissytimes, too, and then the other girl starts acting all smug about it.

The other girls all start chatting and wondering if Kiss Girl is lying or not, wondering if it’s all part of a strategy.  And they go on talking about how the competition is so high and that even though they are friendly toward each other, they still feel compelled to try and outdo each other.  This is a lot better than earlier in the book, where it presented the competitiveness between the girls as a matter of course and not something created by the situation.  But in this case, it just pissed me off in new ways.  The book invented this crazy competitive situation, then bemoans the competitive situation?  This is not the sort of thing most readers are going to be experiencing in their lifetimes, and it wasn’t handled with enough grace at the start to be considered social commentary on how most girl-on-girl hate is artificially engendered.  Plus, America’s only actually been friends with one person, and she still hates Celeste and Bariel as much as ever.  It’s hard to really care about this section here and how sad it is that friends are forced to compete when America isn’t friends with any of the girls that are currently talking.  These here are just the girls that she tends to lump all together and treat as one entity, which isn’t giving me warm fuzzy feelings toward her ‘problem.’

“The only thing to do is be yourself. I’d rather have Maxon send me home for being myself than keep me for being like someone else.”

Did you get it yet?  Did you?  No?  Well, don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll repeat the message a few more thousand times before the end of the book.

You know, it’s really hard to take this ‘be yourself’ message seriously when it’s being presented by a Mary Sue.  Of course she likes herself.

You know what this doesn’t address?  People who don’t like themselves for perfectly valid reasons.  Look, I know there’s all sorts of issues right now with young girls and self-esteem, but what about situations where self-improvement really is the answer?  Sometimes the best course of action isn’t to just convince yourself that you’re perfect as-is and never change.  Sometimes a person has to work at developing better social skills so they can have friends and be happy.  Sometimes a person has to make a concentrated effort to get off the couch and take an interest in some hobbies because they realize that sitting around and checking facebook all day makes them sad.

Sometimes people want to change parts of themselves, and that’s okay.  It’s not even fake.  Frankly, the desire to change is a part of your personality, so following it doesn’t make you some horrible traitor to yourself.  In fact, I’d wager that most people aren’t Mary Sues and would like to change some aspect of themselves.  As long as the change isn’t being made to satisfy an outside party, that’s okay.  Change whatever the hell you want.  Do what it takes to make yourself happy.  Be an active participant in defining your own character and story.

There’s a reason the phrase goes “and the pursuit of happiness.”

*puts away soapbox*  Whew, I think I got a little off-track there.  Moving on.

Then another girl comes in squealing about some combs the prince gave her as a gift, and the previous several paragraphs about being yourself and not letting the competition define you and supporting fellow women gets thrown out the window in favor of going on about “oh, why does Maxon like her more than me!?!??!?!”  This is a big part of why all the supposedly ‘good’ messages in this book irk me.  They just ring false, because they’re hammered into a setting where no one takes them to heart.

You can’t just say good stuff and then do bad stuff and think that counts for having good morals, book.  Especially when the stuff you say isn’t even all that good.

Then Miss Manners comes in to announce that the king and queen of Swendway are coming to town.  Uh…Sweden and Norway?  Great, now in addition to all of Asia being glomped together, let’s treat Scandinavia as an interchangeable lump, too.  Hey, they’re right next to each other, so they’re basically the same already, right?  Fuck you, book.  The queen’s family is coming in to meet the girls as well, so in preparation for all this meeting-ness, the girls get more classes.

Three days later, there’s a big party out on the palace grounds, because if your palace is getting routinely attacked by rebels, that makes it the perfect place to be hosting visiting heads of state.

The Swendish queen—whose name I couldn’t pronounce to save my life—was almost as beautiful as Queen Amberly and seemed to be a dear friend to her.

So, here we have a new female character, and what’s the only thing we know about her?  She’s pretty, but not as pretty as a woman with a name.  Yeah, go on and keep telling yourself that you aren’t shallow, book.  And then go right on ahead being overly focused on women’s appearance while caring about shit-all else.  That’s just so fucking deep, right there.

Two of the girls call America over to meet Amberly’s sister, though they giggle as they do it.

She was curvaceous and held a near-empty glass of wine that, based on the heavy look in her eyes, was not her first.

They giggle because Aunt Adele is a full-figured drunk.  We now have two women in this book that aren’t skinny: ChinaMom and Aunt Drunkie.  Not a good track record, book.

Apparently Adele is from ‘Honduragua.’  …Honduras and Nicaragua?  Are you fucking kidding me?  Now all of Central America is part of Illea, too?  How big is this fucking country?  No wonder they’re at war and being rebel-ized.  The place is too big to properly administer.  It’s huge, unwieldy, and covers a vast number of different climates and different cultures.  I’m not saying it can’t be done, but governing a tropical location is much different from governing a fucking tundra, and doing both at the same time is incredibly difficult. 

And what is the point of smashing those two together?  What is the point of any of the country smashes she’s done?  If these two countries wanted to be together, they would be already.  Brushing over all this without an explanation is just boggling, unless the book wants us to think those ‘alliances’ talked about earlier are the same thing as country-smashes.  Except, if so, well that’s fucking stupid.  That’s stupidity on an almost unbelievable level.  Countries to not smash together.  One might get eaten by another one, but the result has never been a portmanteau of both names.  Either the eaten country becomes part of the eater country, or the smash gets a new name. 

Country names mean things.  They are not just pretty sounds that get picked out of the ether and strung together.  ‘Honduras’ means ‘depths’ in Spanish, and there’s an unconfirmed quote attributed to Columbus that says “Thank God we have come out of those depths,” referring to reaching the coast of Honduras.  There’s another theory, which says that it’s a castilianization of ‘Huntulha,’ which was a word used by the locals.  Nicaragua is less clear, but it’s thought to come from a city called ‘Nicarao,’ which was the capital city of the most populated indigenous tribe.

In short, both these countries were named after things that had meanings.  Because words have power, they have meaning, and they have cultural significance.  You can’t just rip them apart and stick them together willy-nilly simply because you don’t give a fuck about the cultures that you are busy bastardizing.

Also?  THERE ARE REASONS THESE ARE SEPERATE COUNTRIES.  STOP SMASHING COUNTRIES TOGETHER JUST BECAUSE YOU THINK IT’S CLEVER.  AT LEAST MAKE AN ATTEMPT TO HIDE THE FACT THAT YOU CARE FUCK-ALL FOR OTHER CULTURES.

Ethnocentric fucker.

You know what, if Central America is supposed to be the ‘southern’ that those ‘southern rebels’ are supposed to be from…um, yeah, fuck you, you racist prick of a book.  Way to go, characterizing those south of the US as violent, illiterate bastards, as opposed to the ‘northern’ rebels, who are nice and polite and only knock people out.

So, Aunt Adele is actually a high-functioning drunk and she and America speak quite amiably about beaches, all while the other Selection girls giggle in the background about how Adele is a dirty, dirty drunk.  The one of Adele’s ‘many children’ pull her away and-

Woman from Honduras/Nicaragua.  Drunk.  ‘Curvaceous.’  Dirt-poor.  (Before her sister married up, anyway.)  Has a whole passel of kids.  …  Because fuck racial sensitivity?  I mean, it’s not like any of those things are harmful stereotypes, right?

One of the mean girls (i.e. not named America or Marlee) says that if she wins, her family will be trained on how not to be an embarrassment.  America thinks about how she doesn’t want her family to change at all, and it would be just horrible to expect them to.

Yeah, well, shut the fuck up.  Your family is already perfectly behaved.  Being drunk in front of foreign heads of state, while a racist stereotype, is also a pretty bad situation.  Not wanting to force your family to change is quite different from being supportive of your sister turning into an alcoholic.  Or, since we don’t know the full situation, being supportive of a sister who is so bitter to you that she intentionally gets drunk when you need her sober.  Or…well, really, any of the myriad of situations I can think of.  There’s not a whole lot of ‘good’ situations that lead to Aunt Drunkie, here.  If she’s a moderate drinker and a loving, polite, halfway intelligent sister, she would be sober right now.  Either she’s choosing to be drunk, she can’t stop herself from getting drunk, or no one around her has pointed out that being drunk right now is a bad idea.  No matter how much I love my family, if they acted like that during something this important, I’d try and do something about it, too.

America starts to get mopey as she thinks about change like it can only ever be a bad thing and is never, ever, ever a good thing, and that’s when Maxon comes up to talk to her.  She gets snippy at him.  Before he can suss out why she’s angry, Celeste calls him over, so America goes to talk to Marlee.

Marlee has another secret.  We don’t get to figure it out right now, because this chapter is playing musical characters.  Instead America goes inside and finds Adele in the Women’s Room.  They talk (perfectly lucidly, I might add) about how Queen Amberly is so strong.  What to know why she’s so strong?  Because she had three miscarriages.

Yeah, losing your baby hurts.  It hurts a lot, and it does take a lot of personal strength to put on a smiling face after that.  I’m not contesting that fact.  By why is Amberly’s only point of strength tied to her children?  Why is she only allowed to have character when it pertains to womanly things?  Why is she not allowed to be strong in interpersonal ways?  Why does everything, absolutely everything, about this woman revolve around the men in her life?

Because fuck feminism, that’s why.

And then Adele says that the only thing in the whole wide world that Amberly wants is a daughter, and then when there’s a smaller group, she’ll get all clingy over the girls because she’ll feel motherly to her daughter-in-law.

Because fuck feminism twice, that’s why.

I really didn’t hate any of the girls here, no matter how wrong they might be.

They’re not wrong.  No, seriously, they are not wrong.  Where are you getting this wrongness from?  And what makes you think you can sit there and pass judgment on them and still be ‘better’ just because you don’t ‘hate’ them?  What is your petty declaration of wrongness except a form of hatred?

And why isn’t Adele still drunk?  Does this author not realize that there’s more to being drunk than just hiccuping?  Why make her Aunt Drunkie at all?  Just to fit the racist little image of Central American women, which didn’t fit with the later scene she needed, so Aunt had to sober up right quick?  Fuck, this book just can’t stop digging its own grave, can it?  I’m going to have to bury it twelve feet down by the end of this.

America goes outside because she just as so many feelz that she has to stand around and realize that she has so many feelz.  And, yeah, that’s really what I want to read about right now.  Where’d that plot run off to?

I thought about the queen—hosting visiting leaders, family members, a gaggle of girls all at once. She managed events and backed causes. She assisted her husband, her son, and the country.

Why haven’t we seen this?  Every time the girls deal with any sort of organizational thing, it’s always Miss Manners running it.  And the only hint we’ve had that Amberly backs anything is that she advocated for more education funds in the budget, and she got turned down for that.  Assisted the menfolk how?  She hasn’t done anything.

Here’s a hint, book: if you don’t show it, I won’t believe it.  You can’t just say that Amberly does all this stuff and then only show her being arm-candy and nothing more.  There are a few things that you are allowed to just declare, but a character’s strength is not one of them.

Then America and Maxon do the ear-tugging thing, so I guess we’ll get more talking next chapter.  Oh joy.