This review was originally written and posted in July 2013.

This book has 50 chapters.  50!  We’re not going to spend ten weeks on this thing, so I’ll be doing more than one chapter in a post. 

The book opens with your main character telling us that she’s been in isolation for 264 days.  Not one word spoken to another human being that whole time. 

Points for creativity, but then points taken away for not realizing how fast effects of isolation set in and how damaging those effects are.  After 264 days, we should be representing the auditory hallucinations she’s telling this story to. (On second thought, how cool would that be?)

But she’s about to get the cell mate.   We find out that the people keeping her in prison here are called The Reestablishment, and also we seem to be in the kind of environmental wasteland this is in all YA these days.

I know the sky falls down every day.

The sun drops into the ocean and splashes browns and reds and yellows and oranges into the world outside my window. A million leaves from a hundred different branches dip in the wind, fluttering with the false promise of flight. The gust catches their withered wings only to force them downward, forgotten, left to be trampled by the soldiers stationed just below.

 Okay, so that’s pretty and all, but it’s just pretty.  There doesn’t seem to be any real meaning to it.  It’s just there for the sake of being pretty.  She’s saying “there’s sun sets and this is what they look like.”  Okay, that’s nice.  I guess. 

Maybe if we had any sort of context this would have meaning, but instead it’s just there.

Well, she wakes up and finds her new cellmate is a boy.  This freaks her out.  She thinks “they” did this on purpose to torture her, but we don’t know why yet.

This boy is “gorgeous,” of course.

His first act is to laugh at her and then steal her bed so he can shove it up by his and have a double-wide.  I honestly have no idea how to react to that because our MC is just off in a corner of her own head, still freaking out over him being a boy.

And that’s it for the first chapter.  I’m not sure about that opening.  It’s certainly attention grabbing, and the writing is pretty, but it’s so soulless and distant that I find I just don’t care.  It’s like it wants to introduce this thing that is going to be shocking and upsetting, but I don’t know yet what there is to upset, so I’m not shocked.

The room is heavy with the scent of wet stone, upturned soil; the air is dank and earthy.

That’s basically the same sentence twice.

Raindrops are my only reminder that clouds have a heartbeat. That I have one, too.

…what?

So, he’s the problem I have with stuff like this.  We’re on page five.  We don’t know our MC’s name or anything about her except that she’s continually spouting off lines like this, and she freaks out ability guys for some reason.  I have no sense of her character at all so far.  To me, she’s just a collection of random poetry.  She could be replaced by scribbles on the wall and I wouldn’t notice.

And clouds don’t have heartbeats.  Or anything they I could even vaguely connect to a heartbeat.  Why would you make that metaphor?  What information or image does that tell us?  Nothing.

Wow, more senseless poetry about rain.  I can see I’ll have to skip most of these.  There’s only so many times you can say “that doesn’t even make sense as a metaphor.”

The window tells me we’re not far from the mountains and definitely near the water, but everything is near the water these days.

First, the window didn’t tell you that, the view did.

Second, if all the ice in the world melted, the seas would only rise about 200 feet.  That’s enough to displace the coastal cities and make life generally unpleasant for them – about half the population lives near one coast or another – but that’s not the same as saying that “everything” is close to the water.  Very little is actually going to be closer to the water.

Someone picked up the sun and pinned it to the sky again, but every day it hangs a little lower than the day before. It’s like a negligent parent who only knows one half of who you are.

So the sun is like a negligent parent…because it got pinned in a different place?

 I wonder if the book realizes that this stuff doesn’t actually advance the story or our understanding of the world/characters at all.

a blush of roses on my face. […] I catch the rose petals as they fall from my cheeks, as they float around the frame of my body, as they cover me in something that feels like the absence of courage.

You’re catching metaphorical roses?  Or is the catching metaphorical, too?

The tilt of his head cracks gravity in half.

WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?

GOD DAMNIT, BOOK, METAPHORES DON’T HAVE TO BE LITERAL BUT THEY STILL HAVE TO MEAN SOMETHING!

 The boy wakes up and wants to talk to her, but she’s still freaking out and just wants him to stop looking at her/bothering her.

I taste the stale, wasted oxygen and sigh.

“OXYGEN” AND “AIR” ARE NOT INTERCHANGEABLE WORDS.

 The conversation between the boy and the girl is so full of rambling, “literary” lines of narration that it’s hard to follow.  Basically he asks her name and she guesses that she’s afraid of him and she says “nu-uh.”  But it takes two pages.

Someone delivers breakfast and the boy burns his hand on the tray.  I cannot tell you how boring all this is, especially as the girl just stares out the window, uncaring and thinking about birds.  He touches her shoulder to get her attention, and she blathers on internally about how no one has touched her in so many days, and bad things happen when people touch her, and so on.

And that’s it.  That’s all I can take at once.  It’s hard to really convey how monumentally boring this book is, because it’s nothing but pretty (yet meaningless) phrases strung together with no point or purpose.  There’s nothing to this book yet.  I don’t have a reason to care or an idea of what’s going on.  No one is doing anything.  There’s not even any emotion about what’s going on, except for some freaking-out by the main character which basically just boils down to more bad poetry instead of any honest emotionality.  She doesn’t do anything except narrate.  It’s hard to show over tell when your characters don’t do anything except sit in a corner and spout off melodramatic lines.

Although, it occurs to me, I did complain at the start that the isolated character should be crazy.  I don’t think this really fits with the symptoms of SHU Syndrome, as it’s a very…Hollywood sort of crazy and also doesn’t seem to be intentional.  But talking about clouds having heartbeats certainly does show some disordered, not-of-this-reality type thinking.