The Rift Uprising by Amy S. Foster
My rating: 4/5 cats
People always say, “Oh, I have to get my hair done,” or “I have to pick up my dry cleaning.” In reality there are only a few things you absolutely have to do: eat, sleep, go to the bathroom, and, in my case, show up for my shift at work in front of an interdimensional Rift in time and space.
i was 40 pages from the end of this book before i realized it wasn’t YA. up until that point, reading this as YA, i’d intended to rate it a 3.5 rounded up to 4 stars cats, because i’m a chronic uprounder. but now that i know that this is a book intended for older readers, it’s really hard for me to give it more than a solid three stars cats, because i sort of factor into my star cat-ratings, “how successful is this book in serving its audience?,” and leave it for the review to blab about my personal reaction. and this book is much better suited to a YA than an adult audience.
you may feel free to dismiss all my complaints about audience and counter that with all the really sophisticated YA titles being written today and the trend of these crossover titles bringing adults hip-deep into the YA reading-world, do these age-based distinctions really matter anymore?
but they do. of course they do. not only from a pricing perspective, where adult hardcovers run about 8 bucks more than YA, but also from an expectation of what the reading experience is going to deliver.
i enjoy reading YA novels, both the actiony escapist diversion types and the more realistic issue-based books that continue to surprise me with how competently they tackle difficult subject matters, and how literary and ambitious they often are. but even the “best” YA has bits that appeal specifically to younger readers that a savvy adult reader accepts as being appropriate for the intended audience, but would not work as well in an adult novel. and as a savvy adult reader of YA books, you overlook certain shortcuts or situations that you wouldn’t in a book for adults because you understand the priorities specific to the audience, and you make allowances for them. YA is typically faster-paced and able to get away with glosses because the audience is accustomed to and craving a particular style of storytelling which sucks them in and keeps those pages turning, while adult lit tends to be more descriptive and introspective and fills in more of the blanks that would slow down a teenager who’s used to a faster-paced world with all the tweeting and texting we fogeys are still fumbling at with our palsied hands.
there are situations in this book that i’d been excusing as YA-acceptable that, once i had to reexamine through the adult lit filter, became more glaringly weak. it’s not that it’s a bad book at all, but it definitely reads like YA, and i think it’s doing itself a disservice by being marketed as an adult novel, because it doesn’t hold up against other adult sci-fi books in terms of its science, its worldbuilding, or its themes, which are much more suitable for a younger audience, tending to appreciate character, romance, and action over all the scientific explanations or sociological import an older sci-fi crowd values.
again, it’s a fun book with a great premise: a near-future scenario in which scientists have created secret portals, or “rifts,” into the multiverse in a bunch of different locations around the world, through which creatures from other pockets of the multiverse begin to emerge with varying degrees of communication-abilities, violent tendencies, and ability to exist in ‘our’ world. these ‘immigrants,” be they animals, humanoid types, unicorns, or vikings, are all taken to “the village” and kept in camps done up like little touristy gated communities and encouraged to acclimate to our ways for everyone’s safety, even though they ain’t never gonna integrate into the larger world, especially the ferocious karekins, who are automatically killed whenever they emerge from the rift, due to their hyper-aggression in all past experiences. one species, the roones, are helpful humanoid types, far surpassing us in their tech-skills, and these alone are allowed to work alongside our scientists to manage the risk the rifts present. to that end, scientists begin screening children and implanting specific types with chips giving them special abilities, forgoing the pesky matter of parental consent, and only telling the children themselves when they are activated as “citadels” at the age of fourteen, when they become responsible for guarding the portals and using their enhanced abilities to deal with whatever comes out. in a pleasantly chilling detail, only the most average and ordinary children are selected because scientists do not want to take a potentially bright future away from a gifted child and they want their “super” soldiers to appear as unremarkable as possible.
these teenaged citadels have super healing abilities, increased stamina, athletic abilities, eidetic memories, and they are trained in languages, fighting techniques, wilderness survival skills, and weaponry, while their parents think they are just in school, being regular teenagers. along with having been ‘improved’ in so many ways, there is yet another thing preventing them from behaving as normal teenagers – they can never get their swerve on, nor even have too powerful feelings of a sexual nature. any time these lustful urges manifest, something called the “blood lust” comes over them, which always results in severe injuries to both parties, particularly if one of them isn’t a citadel with magical healing abilities. ryn whittaker is a seventeen-year old-citadel based at the washington state rift, where she is the tactical leader of beta team, about to uncover all sorts of secrets surrounding the rifts and the nature of the citadels.
i loved the portals and the “what will come out next?” aspect of it, and the idea of genetically-modified people in a secret organization forced to live double lives with strict limitations on their personal freedoms – all of this has great potential for tension and dramatic situations, and for the most part, it delivers on that potential, but now that i know this is for adults, it just puts all the things i was excusing as being “YA-ish” here into a context that i just don’t see working as a book for older folks who’ve been around longer, who’ve read and experienced more.
instalove. instalove, in YA, is very common. and of course it is – it resonates with the experiences of readers of that age – the heady adolescent period where you’re testing the romantic waters, figuring out what you’re attracted to – all young and full of curiosity and the novelty of being drawn to someone without knowing why. back when i was a young’un, i had all sorts of little crushes that were nothing more than,”that person is pretty, and i wanna kiss ’em.” but adults have different priorities, and understanding why two characters would be attracted to each other gives the story plausibility and impact. we want to know why people are into each other – we want some basic attempt at character development. so, while i’m totally willing to overlook instalove in YA because i understand its appeal to that audience (while still rolling my eyes at it because it’s trite), it just seems like a lazy elision to have a character fall for a boy on the sole grounds of him being her type of gorgeous, even when the character is herself a teenager. especially when she makes a point to say later, of another character:
Does he think because he admitted to me that I was an actual girl, with boobs, that I want to confess my love to him or something? I don’t know a lot about guys, but I know it doesn’t take much to get one sexually attracted to you. Does he actually believe I’m naive enough to confuse normal teenage lust with real feelings? Is this his version of flirting?
for all her awareness that attraction resides in something more than just proximity, she never provides a reason for falling for a newly-arrived-by-portal dude other than this “gorgeous,” quality, which is certainly not enough to justify the solemn vow she makes to herself, the day they meet, that he will be the only person in the world I will never lie to.
that’s a lot of melodrama to put on such a flimsy foundation.
the preoccupation with sex is also something that is, ironically, less suitable in an adult book than a YA title. i get it – you’re all teenagers entrusted with a responsibility that would be taxing and stressful even for an adult, forced to lie to your families and train relentlessly, and there’s a huge emphasis on physicality and adrenaline and all that free-floating energy, but you can never bone. and that’s horrible and frustrating, i get it. but there’s just such an emphasis upon wanting to have sex here, in all the citadel-characters, and simple horniness is responsible for so much of the plotting and for decisions that have really serious consequences. it’s perfectly in keeping with the YA audience, who (hopefully) don’t have as comfortable a relationship with their own sexuality as adults with decades of experience under their belts (oHO), when there’s still all sorts of mystery and a little of the forbidden attached to sexuality, but an adult audience might want a bit more than just “me want sex” as a justification for the decisions of these characters.
then there are situations straight out of james bond films, which have been parodied so many times, it’s awkward to encounter them “straight,” where a mutually-threatening conversation occurs between two adversaries while their heavily-armed and -trained people surround them with their fingers hovering over the triggers; people who shoot things all the time without hesitating, and yet, here – everyone’s just standing around letting them talk it out, while ryn is View Spoiler » until it’s like ‘oooops, why didn’t we shut this down instead of just standing here like the background props we are?’ you can overlook little things like that in YA, for the sake of tension or whatever, but an adult is gonna raise an eyebrow at the standoff cliché, especially in a book that actually references james bond at least twice.
and speaking of references. in place of actual worldbuilding, there’s relentless name-dropping of stuff that exists for us, without a single introduction of something pop-cultural that may have occurred between “now” and 2020, when this book is set. (except for maybe Transformers 5, which is actually coming out in 2017, so – oops) so you have references to harry potter and buffy the vampire slayer and twilight and true blood and game of thrones and downton abbey and great british bake-off and josh groban and rent and the little mermaid and ender’s game and bourne identity and liam neeson and mad max and dr who and the hunger games and converse and best buy and starbucks and hobbits and meryl streep and red dawn and voodoo doughnuts and star trek and martha stewart and ewoks and oprah and my little ponies and planet of the apes and the matrix and the exorcist and syfy and hbo and ipads and x-boxes and mp3s and larping and google and ben and jerry’s and every comic book hero/ine from spiderman to wonder woman to the x-men to batman to captain america to the fantastic four but not ONE new thing between now and 2020. and some of the references seem dated even to someone reading this now, in 2016. is the gilmore girls still going to be a relevant show to teenagers in 2020? will friday night lights references be part of a teenager’s snark, nine years after it was cancelled?
“Don’t you ever get sick of it?” I ask him sincerely. “Being so aloof and guarded…the Tim Riggins of it all?”
would this conversation take place?
“Okay, here we go, Ryn. Fuck, Marry, Kill: Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Christian Bale. Go.”
….
“Are we talking American Psycho Christian Bale or The Machinist Christian Bale?” I manage to answer with a little smile on my face.
“Ohhh, that’s a good question. And I like how you didn’t bring Batman CB into the mix, ’cause it’s so obvious.
i don’t know, but the constant barrage of name-droppery became both tiresome and bafflingly locked-in-time.
it’s a satisfying book, but it’s so clearly YA. there’s plenty of instances of ryn using her strength and wits to confront casual sexism and more serious girl-assaults, making her a great heroine for teen readers to cheer on, and she’s got a good snap to her: He’s like an enigma wrapped in a mystery wearing a smirk that makes me want to never stop slapping him, but even the assault scene lacks weight – it’s see problem/solve problem/move on with no psychological component. everything is just too easy in general. for such a tightly-controlled seeecret experiment, ryn gets away with a lot of stuff she probably wouldn’t have in adult dystopian sci-fi. she’s going places she’s not supposed to go and learning things she’s not supposed to know and flagrantly flaunting this knowledge without serious consequences. and the ending? let’s just say that she creates a huge game-changing situation with no indication that the aftereffects have been considered, which is absolutely fine for a YA first-book-in-a-trilogy cliffhanger, but an adult is going to have some questions. not about “what happens now?,” because that’s for book two to divulge, but “what did you expect to happen? were you just gonna make this mess and not clean it up – did you have no strategy or plan in place to deal with this fallout that’s going to affect everything so fundamentally?”
but then, impulsive behavior without considering the bigger-picture consequences, well – that’s the best part about being a teenager, right?
if this were YA, i would totally give it 4 stars cats, but i think adult readers who are expecting adult sci-fi are going to find it too slight.
