Pure by Julianna Baggott
My rating: 4/5 cats
Before the Detonations, there were many survivalists living off the grid in those woods. One neighbor, an old man who’d been in a war or two, taught El Capitan how to hide his guns and ammo. El Capitan did everything Old Man Zander told him to. He bought 40 PVC pipe with end caps, six inches in diameter, and some PVC solvent. He and Helmud disassembled their rifles in their house one afternoon in late winter. El Capitan remembers the driving sleet, the sound of it ticking against the windows. The two brothers rubbed the gun parts down with anti-rust oil, which gave the guns and their hands a waxy sheen. Helmud had gotten hold of the aluminized Mylar bag, cut it into smaller pieces, and wrapped the barreled actions, stocks, trigger assemblies, hand guards, magazines, scopes, mounts, and several thousand rounds of .223 along with silica gel desiccant packets…They packed six small cans of 1,1,1-trichloroethane to degrease it later, plus cleaning rods, patches, Hoppe’s No. 9 Solvent, gun oil, grease, a set of reloading dies, and a well-worn owner’s manual. Then they wrapped it all in duct tape.
…i’m sorry – is this book really written by the same person that wrote
???
i have not read the pink book, but i doubt it reads like this one. this seemed more up my alley. and boy, was it ever.
so what we have here are scorched-earth survivors vs. the dome. dome-people are safe and pure and protected and lovely, while those caught outside the dome after the capital-d detonations are terrifically altered. people are fused to objects: a doll where a hand once was, a fan in a throat, glass and metal embedded and become part of skin. others are fused to other people, or animals, trees, the ground itself.
and still they survive.
and it is beyond bleak.
the story is a split-POV between some pures and some “wretches,” and involves a dome breakout, a search for lost family, some exploding heads, some detective work, and a school dance.
it is a whole lotta fun.
there are some weak sections; i do not fully understand the OSR; a military group that snatches people outside the dome away when they turn 16 to be drafted into their ranks. wouldn’t that mean that everyone over that age should be part of the military? but there are still plenty of people trading and doing jobs other than being military, so i probably just missed something along the way because i was pretty feverish while reading this and there is a lot of detail and i kind of got carried away by the more fantastic imagery and may have dropped a detail or two that didn’t involve doll-hands and the general wave of mutilation.
there are other moments like these where there is some muddling, but i am not sure if that can be blamed on the book or on this reader’s surely-fatal illness.
i am not sure if this would be a successful crossover read into the YA audience. as someone who reads a lot of YA dystopian fiction, this one differs greatly from the YA norm in both its pacing and its lack of romantic subplots. YA dystopian fiction is the fastest-paced stuff on earth. so much so that frequently, there is no time spent on minor details, and in the worst of the bunch, major details such as how and why things came to get so bad. but you can tell just from the paragraph i quoted up top that this goes into quite a lot of detail, and the writing is way more deliberate than most YA fare. i like the YA stuff because it is instant gratification. this one takes its time filling in the gaps and slowly unspinning its yarn. i thought it was great, but if a reader goes into it expecting it to be the same tone as a YA novel, they are probably going to be disappointed.
plus, it is way brutal.
and there are some romantic elements here, but just barely. look for your love elsewhere. come here for your stubborn humanity.
i was not satisfied by the ending, fever or no, so this is only getting four stars cats, but i am very excited to read the next one. bring it on, lady!
(koff. and pity me)
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pure makes the 100 notable books list, even though it is a pretty perfunctory list this year. but this one’s inclusion was a pleasant surprise.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/boo…
