Enclave by Ann Aguirre
My rating: 4/5 cats
this book has absolutely nothing in common with the hunger games. sure, there are kids who fight, but the circumstances are entirely different. most of the kids in h.g. have not been trained to fight, they are being forced to fight for the entertainment of the capitol. the main character of h.g. is not a girl who has been honed to kill monsters that attack her community, nor one who has been raised in such a sheltered and specific educational-track focused entirely on fighting that emotions are uncomfortable and unfamiliar. katniss had attachments—she loved her sister and her mother, even though she saw her mother as a disappointment—she still had a family bond. deuce has no ties to her family—in the enclave, people rarely know who sired them, so it is an irrelevant distinction.
but enough comparisons. i just got way ahead of myself. i was just peeved that this book is advertised as a “new hunger games,” when they are such dissimilar books. it may very well be the case that fans of hg will also be fans of this, but they might also be fans of artichokes—it is not a given.
so—quick rundown. in this book, a twenty-five year old person is considered elderly, which should give you some idea of the state of things: danger, disease, threats, light deprivation. living in abandoned subway tunnels, after a “game over” caliber epidemic, deuce’s particular community has never been topside, and spend their days surviving in one of three broad societal groupings. just so you know, i hate it when books are reductive like this—that there are only x-number of categories for people to fall into and everything else just gets willfully ignored by the author. but i can overlook it, because it is a trend that is not going away, but it really should. even in the most rigid dystopia, there should be grey areas.
builders, breeders, and hunters. surely there is more to a society. but not here! builders build, breeders breed, and hunters kick the asses of the feral humanoid monsters with the teeth and the claws and provide meat (from other sources) for their people.
and of course, there is a boy, raised outside the enclave, but adopted into it despite having ideeeeas from before. he is barely tolerated by the enclave. enter deuce, and her irresistible attraction to the bad boy and it looks like you got yourself a YA dystopian novel!
it’s bleak, and there are some squidgy bits here—deuce is a character raised within a very narrow framework of possibilities. she is a warrior, with a warrior’s values. fight or die, and never quit. if you are defeated, but not dead, you have done something wrong. and that can be uncomfortable for a reader, when the book kind of breezes over things like rape, which in a normal world, would maybe be treated more sensitively. pedophilia is punished—its perpetrators cut, exiled, and left in the tunnels where their blood will attract the cannibalistic tribes that also live there, but rape is mostly a means-to-an-end situation. and that’s totally gross, but in this world, with people dying so young, the population does need to increase to survive. is this concept too horribly practical for YA?? too callous?? i don’t know. me, i just glossed over it to get to the fighting, but i did have some reservations later View Spoiler » it is very complicated. but it is one of those situations where we cannot place our own value systems upon a different culture, even when the culture is an imaginary underground world in a YA book. and it’s not like all the fighting and murdering and kill kill killing is any better than rape. this is not a pretty world.
but i did enjoy it. i liked the characters, i liked different tribes that were described, along with their different codes and methods for survival. i am always the first one to thumb my nose at science, so plenty of implausibilities i just danced around to get to the good stuff.
it’s short, it’s a quick read—i am looking forward to the next one. i particularly liked where this book left off, and am curious to see the direction she is going to take this baby.
2 more quick complaints. “deuce” is also slang for poo. not a great name for your badass female protagonist.
also—the author mentions the mole people in her acknowledgments, calling it “fantastic.” this is incorrect. it must be a typo, because the mole people is a smug and irritating book written by someone with zero sensitivity to her subject matter. bluck.
