What's Left of Me - 3
Sep. 29th, 2012 11:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainwatersparkMore What's Left of Me chatter.
Yeah, I know I've been talking about this book a lot, but I need something else to focus on besides the LSAT. (And I haven't read anything else recently.)
In terms of structure, this book really, really sucks.
So many things are brought up once and then never mentioned again: Addie's babysitting is one, and more egregiously, the incident at the museum. I mean, come on, they never even explain who set off the flooding or whether it really was only a pipe malfunction (in which case this museum probably has no safety accreditation whatsoever...is there even museum accreditation period in this world?). There's the shopping incident in which a hybrid is randomly discovered and chased after (we never see that character again, and by the way, is there some system by which hybrids can be told apart from regular people? Because it seems like two souls should be good at impersonating each other, and Eva implies that it's usually very difficult to tell when a soul has switched). And of course Hally has to act like an idiot and run toward the criminal in order to set the rest of the plot into motion.
Let's not even go into the fact that Addie/Eva fell off a three-story (or more?) building and survived with no permanent damage. In fact, I don't even think she broke any bones.
I can sum up the plot like so: Addie/Eva meet some Hybrids. Eva tries to control their body. Addie/Eva, Lissa/Hally, and Devon/Ryan are whisked away to a Sketchy McSketchy "hospital," where it takes a hundred pages (or more?) for Addie/Eva to learn The Truth and finally escape to join a Hybrid Resistance movement. The end. 352 pages in 3 sentences.
There is no sense of urgency throughout this book, partly because any danger to the characters happens in random fits. Even when Addie/Eva are at the McSketchy hospital, when they should have been in terrible danger, the plot still felt like it was moving at the pace of spreading molasses. And finally, in order to jumpstart the plot, Addie/Eva happens to fortuitously make contact with a Resistance person. It was about freakin' time.
I'm usually pretty mellow when it comes to worldbuilding in a story, as long as there isn't an obnoxious lack of research or common sense. However, What's Left of Me really does suffer due to scant worldbuilding. It's marketed as a dystopian, but it's more of a fantasy alternate history with a somewhat dystopic/repressive society (for no real reason, but I'll come back to that later), because at no point in the future will people ever be born with two souls, I'm 99.9999% sure. Also, this took me a while to understand, but while the story takes place in "America," it incorporates an alternate history in which the American Revolution was a war on hybrids. The problem is, I didn't realize the author was going down the alternate history path, so I was very confused at first.
Problem #2: Why the heck are hybrids considered so dangerous? The "two souls=insanity" card wasn't played up nearly enough to serve as the main reason. And even if Everything Was a Lie, why do the Powers That Be want to suppress the hybrids? It doesn't seem like there's any point, unless hybrids are better than one soul and would somehow challenge the authority of the Powers That Be.
Problem #3: The whole anti-foreign-thing was incredibly awkward and not at all fleshed out. I think it was meant to be some sort of commentary on anti-immigrant sentiment in the US, but it's barely important in the novel except to make it so that Hally/Lissa and Devon/Ryan are somehow more vulnerable than Addie/Eva to mad science experiments and disappearing off the face of the earth, because no one cares about the foreigners. Except for a candle and tangerine in their house, they seem thoroughly Americanized culturally.
Characters. Oh, characters.
Apart from Addie/Eva, Hally/Lissa, and Devon/Ryan, no other character was three-dimensional by any stretch of imagination, particularly the antagonist(s). Daniel Conivent (still can't get over that last name..."conniving"? Really?) is Generic Villain Doing It For the Evululz. He doesn't even seem to have any particular motivation; he's just EVUL.
Devon/Ryan confused me somewhat, because the two souls seem extremely split in personalities and desires. Ryan is a Sensitive Nice Guy; Devon is a Stoic Cool Guy. Don't they ever come into conflict?
Which leads me into the premise.
What's Left of Me is one of those books that sells heavily on the novelty of its premise...as do most YA dystopian stories these days. It's also one of those books in which, if you spend longer than five minutes actually thinking about the premise, you run into a lot of problematic questions. How distinct can two "souls" be if they're sharing the same body, considering that personality is largely determined by genetics and the environment, and two "souls" in the same body basically grow up in the exact same environment and even share most, if not all, of the same memories? How separate can you actually be? But if two souls largely share the same personality, interests, and skills, is there a point to being born with two souls in the first place?
The only reason I can think of for coming up with this premise is that two souls that are wildly different from each other will cause a lot of conflict, but may possibly be beneficial in terms of one "person" being able to adapt to a wide variety of circumstances. That's never addressed in the book, though.
And now that I think about it, how can a "person" be defined in the book? Is a "soul" a person, or is a "body" a person?
I think about these questions because I often write stories that deal with identity and multiple selves or facets of a self, and because I've flirted with the idea of writing about possession, while thinking through all the implications that possession could bring. In my opinion, What's Left of Me treats its premise in such a superficial manner that it ultimately does not offer anything new to the genre and to the questions that its premise brought up.
Yeah, I know I've been talking about this book a lot, but I need something else to focus on besides the LSAT. (And I haven't read anything else recently.)
In terms of structure, this book really, really sucks.
So many things are brought up once and then never mentioned again: Addie's babysitting is one, and more egregiously, the incident at the museum. I mean, come on, they never even explain who set off the flooding or whether it really was only a pipe malfunction (in which case this museum probably has no safety accreditation whatsoever...is there even museum accreditation period in this world?). There's the shopping incident in which a hybrid is randomly discovered and chased after (we never see that character again, and by the way, is there some system by which hybrids can be told apart from regular people? Because it seems like two souls should be good at impersonating each other, and Eva implies that it's usually very difficult to tell when a soul has switched). And of course Hally has to act like an idiot and run toward the criminal in order to set the rest of the plot into motion.
Let's not even go into the fact that Addie/Eva fell off a three-story (or more?) building and survived with no permanent damage. In fact, I don't even think she broke any bones.
I can sum up the plot like so: Addie/Eva meet some Hybrids. Eva tries to control their body. Addie/Eva, Lissa/Hally, and Devon/Ryan are whisked away to a Sketchy McSketchy "hospital," where it takes a hundred pages (or more?) for Addie/Eva to learn The Truth and finally escape to join a Hybrid Resistance movement. The end. 352 pages in 3 sentences.
There is no sense of urgency throughout this book, partly because any danger to the characters happens in random fits. Even when Addie/Eva are at the McSketchy hospital, when they should have been in terrible danger, the plot still felt like it was moving at the pace of spreading molasses. And finally, in order to jumpstart the plot, Addie/Eva happens to fortuitously make contact with a Resistance person. It was about freakin' time.
I'm usually pretty mellow when it comes to worldbuilding in a story, as long as there isn't an obnoxious lack of research or common sense. However, What's Left of Me really does suffer due to scant worldbuilding. It's marketed as a dystopian, but it's more of a fantasy alternate history with a somewhat dystopic/repressive society (for no real reason, but I'll come back to that later), because at no point in the future will people ever be born with two souls, I'm 99.9999% sure. Also, this took me a while to understand, but while the story takes place in "America," it incorporates an alternate history in which the American Revolution was a war on hybrids. The problem is, I didn't realize the author was going down the alternate history path, so I was very confused at first.
Problem #2: Why the heck are hybrids considered so dangerous? The "two souls=insanity" card wasn't played up nearly enough to serve as the main reason. And even if Everything Was a Lie, why do the Powers That Be want to suppress the hybrids? It doesn't seem like there's any point, unless hybrids are better than one soul and would somehow challenge the authority of the Powers That Be.
Problem #3: The whole anti-foreign-thing was incredibly awkward and not at all fleshed out. I think it was meant to be some sort of commentary on anti-immigrant sentiment in the US, but it's barely important in the novel except to make it so that Hally/Lissa and Devon/Ryan are somehow more vulnerable than Addie/Eva to mad science experiments and disappearing off the face of the earth, because no one cares about the foreigners. Except for a candle and tangerine in their house, they seem thoroughly Americanized culturally.
Characters. Oh, characters.
Apart from Addie/Eva, Hally/Lissa, and Devon/Ryan, no other character was three-dimensional by any stretch of imagination, particularly the antagonist(s). Daniel Conivent (still can't get over that last name..."conniving"? Really?) is Generic Villain Doing It For the Evululz. He doesn't even seem to have any particular motivation; he's just EVUL.
Devon/Ryan confused me somewhat, because the two souls seem extremely split in personalities and desires. Ryan is a Sensitive Nice Guy; Devon is a Stoic Cool Guy. Don't they ever come into conflict?
Which leads me into the premise.
What's Left of Me is one of those books that sells heavily on the novelty of its premise...as do most YA dystopian stories these days. It's also one of those books in which, if you spend longer than five minutes actually thinking about the premise, you run into a lot of problematic questions. How distinct can two "souls" be if they're sharing the same body, considering that personality is largely determined by genetics and the environment, and two "souls" in the same body basically grow up in the exact same environment and even share most, if not all, of the same memories? How separate can you actually be? But if two souls largely share the same personality, interests, and skills, is there a point to being born with two souls in the first place?
The only reason I can think of for coming up with this premise is that two souls that are wildly different from each other will cause a lot of conflict, but may possibly be beneficial in terms of one "person" being able to adapt to a wide variety of circumstances. That's never addressed in the book, though.
And now that I think about it, how can a "person" be defined in the book? Is a "soul" a person, or is a "body" a person?
I think about these questions because I often write stories that deal with identity and multiple selves or facets of a self, and because I've flirted with the idea of writing about possession, while thinking through all the implications that possession could bring. In my opinion, What's Left of Me treats its premise in such a superficial manner that it ultimately does not offer anything new to the genre and to the questions that its premise brought up.
