America goes into the treehouse and continues to pretend like we care about the whole “is she pretty or not” question.  Duh, of course she’s pretty.  Lazy writers don’t let the hero be un-pretty, because as we all know, only pretty people can date the pretty boys, and you can’t write a book without pretty boys.  It just isn’t done.  Then, America and Aspen start to make out, because we’re on the second chapter of this book, and teenaged make out sessions are honestly the most interesting thing that’s happened so far.  Although perhaps I only find it interesting because of the grammar. 

(To be fair, I’m working off an ARC.  To be unfair…come on, this is the second-to-last version of this book so these passages had to have made it past an editor or two.)

It wasn’t much more than a five-by-five-foot cube; even Gerad couldn’t stand up straight in here. But I loved it.

These punctuation choices make it read like the author just paused for a breath and decided to put a period in.  Actually, she writes a lot like I do in these reviews, but…I write as if I should put a period in every time I pause for a breath.  I put a little bit more thought into my books and fanfics.  For instance, the above sentences could have been cleaned up in a number of ways.

“It wasn’t much more than a five-by-five cube – even Gerad couldn’t stand up straight in here – but I loved it.”

“It wasn’t much more than a five-by-five cube, but I loved it.”  (Does anyone here know how tall Gerad is?  No.  So it fails as a descriptive phrase.)

There was no Selection, no miserable family, no Illéa itself. There were only Aspen’s hands on my back pulling me closer, Aspen’s breath on my cheeks.

Technically, this is correct.  Sort of.  See, in that first sentence, there’s an omitted ‘or,’ and all those options are to be taken singularly, so the single verb is used.  In the second, there’s an omitted ‘and,’ so both those things are taken together and become a plural subject, hence the plural verb.  BUT!  It looks so clunky and lacks symmetry.  I know I’ve said before that an author’s job is to use words correctly, not just to make them look pretty, but they do also have to look pretty.  They have to be pretty and correct.  I know, it’s a tall order, but that’s why not everyone can should be a bestselling author.  (Personally, I wouldn’t even try for the symmetrical construction in the above case.  There’s just no way to make it flow unless you change the entire thing.  “Everything else faded away.  The Selection, my miserable family, Illea itself.  There were only Aspen’s hands on my back, pulling me closer, and Aspen’s breath on my cheeks as I wondered why the fuck he’s breathing on my cheeks instead of kissing me.  Really, boys are so weird sometimes.”)

My hands went to his black hair, still wet from his shower—he always took showers at night—and tangled themselves into a perfect little knot.

I’m actually not sure about the rule for this one.  I think it’s permissible for that em-dash to do double-duty as a comma, which would make the sentence technically correct.  But why would you write a sentence so clunky, even if the punctuation does work?  Why do we need to know that he takes his showers at night?  She just told us that he took a shower, then interrupts herself to tell us that he takes showers.  And she ate a comma to do it.

He had dark hair and green eyes, and this smile that made you think he had a secret.

Hi, little comma buddy.  What’ch’a doin in there?  Just hanging out?  That’s cool.  I guess you were feeling left out after that shower thing earlier.

His black T-shirt was worn to threads in several places, just like the shabby pair of jeans he wore almost every day.

But America’s clothes are always nice and un-frayed, because her family only works three months out of the year.  Wait…

Aspen has twin sisters that also got letters like America did, because everyone between sixteen and twenty gets one.

It hurt me to be away from him. Some days I went crazy wondering what he was doing.

Typical, I guess.  Teens are pretty hormonal. 

And when I couldn’t handle it, I practiced music. I really had Aspen to thank for me being the musician that I was.

And this is typical, too, but it far more ragey.  So far America has one thing to her credit – one thing – and that’s her musical skills.  Now that’s being taken away from her and handed to a guy.  Okay, sure, the actual skill isn’t being taken, but the credit for it is.  Here we see America isn’t hard-working or passionate about her music of even just determined to be good so she can provide for her family.  Nope, she’s just passing time while thinking about her boyfriend.  It all goes back to the boy. 

Aspen was a Six. Sixes were servants and only a step up from Sevens in that they were better educated and trained for indoor work.

And a Seven is…?  A gardener?

But moving on.  Hey, let’s talk about servants!  There’s not just one group of them.  Want to prove it?  Go up to a mansion, knock on the door, and ask for a job cleaning toilets.  They’ll laugh at you while their private security runs you off the property.  Once you get yourself straightened out, go to the company that contracts with that mansion and provides their hired help.  Ask for a job cleaning toilets.  They’ll ask you for a resume and demand to know how much experience you have.  Tell them you don’t need experience to clean rich toilets.  They’ll laugh you out of the office.

Now go to Motel 6.  Ask for a job cleaning toilets.  Get a job, clean the toilet. 

There is a hierarchy to these things.  At a fancy hotel or in a large house-hold, the head honcho of the hired help could make six figures.  They run that shit like it’s the marines of cleaning.  They are smart, dedicated, detailed, and on the ball.  It takes skill.  At the bottom of the totem pole, yeah, you find unskilled laborers, but that’s kind of the point.  There’s a range of experiences to be had as a servant, all the way from toilet scrubber to running the castle. 

And, trust me, you do not piss off the servants.  EVER.  You especially do not piss off every servant available.

Telling me that servants are two steps above dirt is like telling me that artists are three steps above.  I really don’t know if this is a social stigma, or if the society is so bum-fuck crazy that they dress all of their servants in rags.  Am I supposed to take away from this that Aspen works in a Motel 6, or that servants in general are shat upon?  Am I supposed to assume that America’s family is full of crappy artists, or that aliens have lobotomized the human race so they no longer crave art? 

So, Aspen is from a lower caste, and that’s okay.  No, really.  She says that a guy can marry someone from a higher caste, but that the woman has to move down and join his caste.  (Girls, by the way, marry up instead of down, because fuck feminism.  The girl must always go to the guy, the guy can’t ever join the girl’s caste.  Even though this is set in the future, so there’s no reason to keep this toxic little hangover.  Really.  It’s set in the future.  I don’t care if it’s dystopia; you can still have a gender-neutral society.  Stuff like this makes it seem like feminism is something that takes…what’s the right word.  Maintenance?  Like, they think that if there’s enough other problems, we’ll just backslide in misogyny, because being equal is just so hard and treating women like second-class citizens is natural.  It’s not natural.  There is no reason that I’ve seen yet in this novel for why this can’t be a completely gender neutral society.)

Ahem, anyway, as I was saying.  If America wants to marry Aspen, it’s perfectly legal for her to do so.  There’s paperwork, but that’s just paperwork. 

So us being this personal and out well past Illéa curfew … we could both get in serious trouble.

Um, no, you just got done telling us it was fine.  In the same paragraph as this sentence, you said it was fine.  It is looked down upon by society, because everyone thinks you should want to stay in your own caste or a higher caste, but social stigma is not the same thing as ‘serious trouble.’  (Or is it?  I guess we really don’t know what social stigma involves in this story.)

But I loved Aspen. I’d loved Aspen for nearly two years. And he loved me. As he sat there stroking my hair, I couldn’t imagine entering the Selection. I was already in love.

As we have already covered, being selected does not mean you have to fall in love with the prince guy.  Just take the money, have fun with the pretty dresses, then go home.

Why is this such a problem?  Other characters even bring up the money issue several times, but no one seems to connect it to the idea that you can go on this Selection thing and intentionally not win.

“How do you feel about it? The Selection, I mean?” I asked.

“Okay, I guess. He’s got to find a girl somehow, poor guy.”

When this was introduced, it was stated that this is the normal run of things.  All the princes for generations have picked brides this way.  It’s not a comment on this prince and his woman skills, it’s just how your culture does stuff.  On top of that, it’s done because whoever is in charge said that it would make the people feel more connected to their rulers.

“Okay, okay. Well, part of me thinks it’s kind of sad. Doesn’t the prince date? I mean, can he seriously not get anyone?

I refer you to my previous comment, which referred you to your own first chapter.  Continuity, what’s that?

(On top of that, yeah, does the prince date?  That is sad!  Can you imagine, maybe you see a pretty girl in your class, or you meet the daughter of some bigwig visiting the palace, and you think “wow, she’s so pretty, I should go talk to her,” but then you remember it won’t matter because in a few years you’ll have to pick some other girl to marry, while on TV no less.  What do you do?  Date anyway, assuming that it’s not going to last so it doesn’t matter?  Hang back and be socially stunted because you never learn to talk to your female peers?)

It’s exciting. He’s going to fall in love in front of everyone.

What the fuck is this?  No he’s not. 

Wait, is the Selection really supposed to be about falling in love?

Excuse me while I go and slam my head against a wall.

Look, I know Kate and William had a nice public love story, but they didn’t have a lotto to find each other.  Your odds of finding love in a 35 person sized pool are…astronomical.  The only reason it works on the Bachelor is because those people all volunteered to be on the show (thereby kind of preselecting themselves to be of a certain disposition: willing to be embarrassed for the sake of the spotlight), everyone knows it’s not really love that’s going on, and, oh yeah, no one has to rule a fucking country at the end of it.

This should be about finding a girl that can be queen without totally fucking over the whole place.  If the prince loves her, that’s a nice bonus, but it really should be second on the list of considerations.

Also?  It’s possible to have a lasting, stable, good marriage without being in love first.  Love is what affairs are for.  (It’s also possible to have a good marriage with being in love first, but as I covered in 50 Shades, love is not the end-all, be-all.)

 Well, let’s move on from all that.  America brings out her leftovers to ‘share,’ because Aspen is just so hungry.

Where meals were a worry at my house, they were a disaster at Aspen’s. He had much steadier work than we did but got paid significantly less. There was never enough food for his family.

Why?  Why is Aspen being paid less for working all year than America is getting paid for working three times a year?  This had to be an intentional decision on the part of their society, because as things stand now, servants get paid a decent wage.  You’re not going to support a family of nine on a Motel 6 salary, that’s true, but America is talking here like all servants are paid like this.  As if there’s one base pay that everyone in the caste gets, and that’s it.  So someone, at some time, sat down and decided that servants would get paid shit, because…??? 

After two seconds of searching, I found a job listing for a housekeeping company that contracts out to rich clients.  They have an opening that pays $17/hour.  Granted, that’s a bit high, but other listings averaged about $10-12/hour.  This book is assuming that servants routinely get paid shit, because being a servant is shitty.  It’s not.  It’s a job, like any other job.  There is nothing automatically worse about cleaning houses for a living than there is about…well, anything else out there.  You get paid to do a specific thing, then you do that specific thing.  That’s it.  Being a servant is not like being a slave, unless you intentionally set up your society to crush your serving class, and why the fuck would you do that? 

This is not a natural set-up!  It’s an artificially created one, and we have no idea why it was created!

Moving on.  Aspen is always hungry because he gives all his food to his younger siblings and his mom. 

His dad had died three years ago, and Aspen’s family depended on him for almost everything.

It’s specifically stated that his mom is always working, thus she’s always tired, but I guess that doesn’t count for shit.  His dad is dead, therefore it’s all on him, because even though his mom is still employed…yeah, who the fuck cares, she doesn’t have a penis?

Really, there’s two options here.  One, every servant gets paid the same amount, therefore Aspen and his mom bring in the same income, therefore…no, they don’t all depend on him, the younger kids depend on both of them together.  Two, servants get paid differently depending on where they work and in what position, the same as the real world.  In that case, Aspen’s mother is older, has more experience, and has more seniority.  She should be in a job that she’s been in for years, and therefore making more than just the base pay that a teenager would get. 

Either way you slice it, Aspen’s mother should not be utterly dismissed like this.  She’s an adult, she’s a parent, and she shouldn’t be supplanted by her son just because said son is a boy.

I watched with satisfaction as he licked the spices from the chicken off his fingers and tore into the bread.

Spices cost money.  No, really.  On average, you’ll spend about $1.50 per ounce for herbs, which most people consider spices, and actual spices cost even more.  Spices don’t have any calories or nutritional value.  You fucking middle class brat.

He’d done some clerical work for one of the factories, and it was going to carry him through next week, too. His mom had finally gotten into a routine of housecleaning for a few of the Twos in our area. The twins were both sad because their mom had made them drop their after-school drama club so they could work more.

Wait, wait, wait.  Are the servants being classed as “anyone who does a job for someone else”?  This caste puts housework and clerical work in the same category.  What defines a ‘servant’?  I’m a security guard.  I report to my employer every day, listen to him tell me where to go and what to do, and then I do it.  Does that mean I’m a servant?  On the side, I also do copy-editing.  People give me stuff and tell me to edit it, and sometimes they give me more specific instructions on what kind of feedback they want.  I follow their instructions and get paid.  Does that make me a servant squared?  And if just doing work as directed makes someone a servant, then what the fuck are the other castes doing?

Why does his mom not already have a steady job?  Is the market flooded with housekeepers, and that’s why she can’t find a permanent position?  This is not the normal run of things.  Housekeepers work steady jobs just as much as people in any other profession.  It’s not the normal run of things to always be scrambling for houses to clean.  This is an unnatural scenario, and we still don’t know why it exists.

Also, look!  Two more females who are working and bringing income into the house!  That’s now four people in his household that are contributing money, but for some reason, everyone depends on the one that has a penis.   

How little are these people being paid if there’s four sources of income and they still can’t feed everyone?  Seriously, four sources of steady income, versus America’s house, where they only find work three times a year.  And yet one family can’t eat and the other family does fine.

“You know how Kamber and Celia are. They need to be around people. They can’t be cooped up cleaning and writing all the time. It’s just not in their nature.”

cleaning and writing

cleaning and writing

Author…we need to talk.  Writing is not a servant job.  It’s…it’s just not.  It’s an artist job.  That you seem to think it’s a servant job is…not even disturbing.  It’s just confounding.

America chides Aspen for trying to do everything for his family when it shouldn’t be all on him.  Um…it’s not.  He’s one of four workers in his family.  Do not sit there and tell me he’s doing so much more than the three working women in his household, because I will smack you.

…it’s not telling me that.  It’s just assuming that I’m going to agree with it that he’s working so hard and doing everything, even though we have no indication that that’s true.  Nothing we have been told in the text states that what he does is harder or pays better than what the women do.  We’re just supposed to assume that the man is more important by default.  God, that’s even worse.

It wasn’t anything new for a Six, Seven, or Eight to just die of exhaustion.

WHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY??????????????????  Seriously, book, TELL ME WHY.  Are they being forced to work so hard they die of exhaustion?  Is the society set up to keep them at below-sustenance pay?  Because if so, that’s an intentional move.  People don’t die of exhaustion unless they are working for sustenance.  If you have enough to live, you’re not going to kill yourself for a little bit extra.  So what is the reason?  Are resources scarce?  Hardly seems likely, since you have enough money for spices and your own bedroom.  So this is being done to the servant caste.  Who’s doing it?  And why?  To keep them oppressed?  You don’t have to kill them to keep them oppressed.  And why is America talking about all this like it’s just a sad fact of life, instead of railing about how her boyfriend might die just because some rich ass in a big house wants to keep all the wealth?  There is literally no anger in this text over the situation, just a sense of resignation.  And on top of all that, why kill off your servant class?  Then there’s no one to do your servant stuff.  Keeping them hungry and scared doesn’t make much sense, either.  Hungry, uncertain people have crappy job performance. 

In short, there is absolutely nothing about any of this that makes a speck of sense. 

“Are you going to enter the Selection?”

“No! Of course not! I don’t want anyone to think I’d even consider marrying some stranger. I love you,” I said earnestly.

You just spent several pages talking about money woes, but you won’t even put your name in for a lotto that would net you lots of money?  God, you’re too stupid to live.

If I had to choose between sleeping in a palace with people waiting on me or the three-room apartment with Aspen’s family, which one did I really want?

Three room or three bedroom?  Oh, does it really matter?  No, no it doesn’t.  Talk to me when there’s a family of seven in one room.  There are places in this world where having a god damned roof makes you rich.

I’m not saying that seven people in three bedrooms (or even three rooms) is nothing to complain about.  That is crowded.  But it’s only crowded by our modern standards, and it’s not as crowded as they could get.  If they literally don’t have enough money for food, but no one’s considered different living arrangements, then they really need to rethink priorities. 

Oh, god, this gets stupider.

They argue about how if they get married, it’ll be hard, because Aspen won’t leave his family to the vagrancies of only have women bringing in income.  Lord knows that three women can’t do shit unless there’s a man around to help.  Then they argue about kids, because Aspen doesn’t want more than two, and he thinks that’s something out of their control.

I couldn’t blame him. If you were wealthy enough, you could regulate having a family. If you were a Four or worse, they left you to fend for yourselves.

Condoms are cheap.  No, really, condoms are hella cheap.  There are also plants and chemicals that come with a side effect of ‘sterility.’  There’s also this novel option of not having vaginal sex.  There are other options for intimacy.  If they want to have only two kids, it is within their control, and things like condoms and infertility are not expensive.  This is not a matter of ‘only the rich can afford it,’ it’s a matter of ‘the rich are intentionally keeping things from the poor because of the LOLZ.’  (Apparently they are also keeping sex education away from the poor.)

But WHY?  Why keep your poor away from birth control?  Historically, poor people have had massive families because they needed to in order to survive, not because they just popped kids out by accident.  Oppressive governments don’t want masses of young, angry, desperate citizens.  In short, this is all backwards.  The rich should be handing out pills like candy, and the poor should be saying “fuck you, it’s baby time.”  Alternately, they rich should be handing out pills like candy, and the poor should be taking them, because having large families only works if you can put them to work early, like you can on a farm.  Kids don’t have to be very old to go out and feed the chickens. 

But Aspen, America, and everyone else in their society are dumber than rocks, so now this is actually a dramatic point.  Uhg.

Aspen tells her to enter the Selection, because it’s a chance for her to get something better, and he’d hate himself if she didn’t at least chance it.  Well, at least this book is consistent about ignoring the obvious.

I let out my breath in a quick huff. “It’s so ridiculous. Think of the thousands of girls entering. I won’t even get picked.”

“If you won’t get picked, then why does it matter?”

Well, at least someone’s finally said it.

“But I don’t love him, Aspen. I don’t even like him. I don’t even know him.”

THAT’S NOT THE POINT YOU WHINEY LITTLE BRAT!

“And if you love me, you’ll do this so I won’t go crazy wondering what if.”

Because everyone in this book just has to be terrible.  Aspen doesn’t want her to join because he honestly wants a better life for her.  He wants her to do it so that he won’t feel guilty.  Because it’s all about the man and his feelings. 

When he made it about him, I didn’t stand a chance. Because I couldn’t hurt him. I was doing everything I could to make his life easier.

See?  Even the book admits as much.  And then treats that like a good thing.  It displays its misogyny front and center and then glorifies it.  Because fuck feminism, that’s why.

America finally decides that she’ll enter so that everyone will stop whining at her, because she’s convinced that she won’t be picked and it won’t matter.  I can’t believe it took most of two chapters to get to this point.

Then she recounts the time that Aspen’s little brother was publically whipped for stealing fruit.  Um…what?  Seems that if he was an adult, he would put on trial and then either put in jail or killed, but little kids get publically beaten.  Because…that’s so much nicer than jail time?  Really, what is the logic here?  Why not put the kid on trial?  Why is that such a hassle over whipping a nine year old?  Why not put his legal guardian on trial instead?

And on top of that, what the fuck, why do we have public beatings?  There is no context for this little bit of information.  Why are they staying around in a society that whips little children?  Is there something keeping them from running off to live in the woods, or escaping to  different country?  Is this a normal thing?  Why do they put up with it?  How oppressive is this regime? 

That last question is rather important.  So far we’ve been shown very little, but it comes off as being economically oppressive rather than marshal.  Are the lower castes being pinned in, forced to work, prevented from movement?  What’s keeping them in place to be beaten?  What’s preventing them from grabbing pitchforks and stabbing the shit out of the police?  You can’t take little miss middle class over here and have her talk about whippings like it’s no big thing.  You can’t have a mild life of treehouses and solitary bedrooms and quiet suburbia and, oh, also, PUBLIC BEATINGS.  There has not been enough oppression in this story so far for you to mention whipping children and then let that reference just hang there unexplained. 

After it happened, Aspen cried about how it was all his fault because he didn’t work hard enough to make enough money so they wouldn’t have to steal.  America thinks ‘It was agonizing, because it wasn’t true.‘  Okay, then, if it’s not Aspen’s fault, whose is it?  This is the first hint we’ve had so far that America recognizes her society isn’t a natural occurrence, but then she just lets that thought go without expanding upon it.  Does she think it’s the fault of the higher castes?  Does she think it’s the fault of fate?  Those are two vastly different concepts.  Whose fault is it!?!?!?!

Then there is more teenaged making out, but they don’t have sex.  America is very clear on the fact that they don’t have sex.  Because…???

America sings for Aspen, and Aspen gives her a penny for it.  America can’t bear to spend these symbolic pennies, so she keeps them all in a jar.  Because these are both middle class brats who can’t be creative enough to exchange something that doesn’t have monetary value, and they keep a jar of pennies while skipping meals.

Fuck these chapters are just stuffed with fail, aren’t they?  And we haven’t even gotten to the rest of the caste system yet.  I can’t make heads or tails of their government or their society.  It’s basically just suburbia with some random references thrown in to make it seem edgy and dark.