#bethany wiggins

So the reason I started this book in the first place was partially for the cover and for the premise, as the cover has this cool bee with a needle on it and I found that interesting! You can look up pictures to see what I mean, but combined with the synopsis on the back I figured hey that might be interesting.

Here's the synopsis:

"Fiona doesn’t remember going to sleep. But when she awakens, her world no longer exists. Her house is abandoned and broken. Her neighborhood is barren and dead. And there is a tattoo on her right hand. A tattoo Fiona doesn’t remember getting…but somehow she must conceal at any cost. Because humanity has been divided. Those bearing the tattoo have turned into mindless, violent beasts that roam the streets and sewers, preying upon the unbranded, while a select few live protected inside a fortresslike wall, their lives devoted to rebuilding society and killing all who bear the mark. And Fiona has awoken branded, on the wrong side of the wall, and…normal."

Which seemed interesting enough to read about!! Oh the world has fallen into chaos and some humans have been turned into mindless beasts if they have this mark, except for some reason the main character..hasn't. She's also just waking up to all this, so what's up with that? Apparently is a sleeping beauty inspired thing, so who knows what happened when she was asleep or how long she was sleeping?

But there are so many parts of this book that are questionable and uncomfortable and also very stereotypical.

A big one being: given the main character is like a sleeping beauty and wakes up four years into the apocalypse without any memory of it starting, she's mentally a 13 year old and still thinks of herself as one, but is in a 17 year olds body and has a 17 year old love interest. And I'm not just saying she still acts like a 13 year old, I mean she says she's thirteen when someone asks her throughout the entirety of the book. I held onto the feeble hope that she would regain some memories of being older throughout the books and then become mentally a 17 year old, but nope! She was in a medically induced coma like the entire time so there are no memories to recover. On the like third to last page there's this line; "[My older sister] gives me a look that makes me duck my head under the covers and giggle. Very thirteen-year-old. But I don't care." Still 13 at the end!!

But her love interest is 17. He is physically and mentally 17. he was not in a medically induced coma for 4 years. And is somehow...the obvious choice for a love interest? There's no love triangle, though maybe there is in the sequel. But they're both physically 17, except mentally Fiona is still 13 and that detail makes it incredibly uncomfortable. The love interest, Dreyden Bowen, is the typical "i will protect you and guide you" kind of love interest, as Fiona is completely out of her depths and a little bit of a frivolous idiot. I cannot blame her for being confused and shaken when she wakes up in a completely different world as she is still a child and there's no reason she would've had survival instincts, but that doesn't make it less infuriating to read about.

There's also the typical falling in love in less than a week situation, where Dreyden and Fiona plan to run away together (he defects from the military for her) to try and find safety, kissing maybe a grand total of 3-4 days after they meet? I will concede that they knew each other as kids and kinda grew up together and the author tries to imply that Dreyden kinda loved her since they were kids...but Fiona didn't. She actually had a bit of an obsession with Dreyden's older brother, Duncan. So for her it was very much a few days situation. They're having nightmares about loosing each other, pledging their hearts to each other, confessing their love, etc. It's been a week. Calm down.

(warning, mentions of the r-slur. skip this paragraph if you don't want to read about it) there's also the nicknames. which are incredibly uncomfortable. Fiona has a normal nickname, Fo, which is a fine nickname. It's the one most people call her and it's respectable enough. But Dreyden calls her Fotard a few times in the beginning, a call back to something he used to call her when they were both kids. And Fiona responds back by calling him Botard (based on his last name, Bowen). And it is...not a singular experience. The nickname is used multiple times, and is even used once in an affectionate way? Fiona is unconscious for several days at the end of the book due to injuries and other things, and when Dreyden sees that she's awake, he uses it almost like a petname. Like it's something special between the two of them, which is so icky to read given that it's a variation of the r-slur.

(warning: ableism and belittling of mental illnesses) There is another thing too!! This dystopian world has the set up of "valuable people get to live inside the wall while the rest of us are left to the streets" which is not great but I don't think anyone's surprised by this kind of story. The one where you have to be physically and mentally healthy in order to be considered worth protecting, and everyone else is left to fend for themselves and die. You're also not allowed to live past 55, as that's when you're kicked out of the nice life inside the wall and no longer considered worth protecting. No one with any physical or mental illness is allowed inside the wall, but there's one specific line that's even ickier than the overused premise of disabled people not being worth protecting: "No one allowed inside who suffers from any type of mental illness--even depression." That's an exact quote and I hate it. It has the mindset that depression isn't a serious mental illness, that it's like a mild thing. Not true! Depression should be taken seriously and considered alongside all others, not treated like some lite version.

There's also so many gender stereotypes and enforcement of gender rules in this book. It's got the typical "women are rare and men will do anything to them when they get their hands on them" thing, so all the girls are pretending to be boys and have "boy haircuts" and "boy clothes" and things like that. You don't want to be caught as a girl, because that's bad news for you! furthermore, because of this girls/women are very rare. So men are taking younger and younger wives and the legal age was dropped down to 15. Women inside the walls are expected to get married and start repopulating the world as soon as possible with men who are!! Several years older than them!! This is more of a critique on the world itself and less on the author, but I do think it could've been written better in the story. I'm not opposed to the horror of a reworked world and so many fundamental values we have as a society thrown out the window, as long as it's done well. This...was not. It was mentioned and Fiona was like "wow that's weird." and Dreyden talked about how it disgusted him, but aside from that there was no mention. It wasn't built into anything meaningful, it's just another tacked on detail of how the world has gone to shit without effective follow through.

Speaking of shit, the name Fecs stands out in a weird way /neg. And I think that's because the author wanted a cool name to call her underground, filthy, poverty stricken class. But in doing so, she neglected human behavior and how they have a tendency to name things. I cannot imagine a world where society as a whole would come up with and normalize the term Feces Dwellers and then call them Fecs. Sure they live in the sewers and are always dirty and smell awful, but Feces Dwellers? Really? In a real world honestly we'd probably call them something to do with shit, but I understand this is a swearing-free novel. I could understand if Fecs was a slang term for Defects, but I cannot grasp how Feces Dweller is what she settled on.

There's also details of the story that just...don't make sense? Fiona punched a man in the face and killed him. Never mentioned again. She was taking a wild swing in self defense and he ended up dead and not once do we see her think about it or do we even know how?? She one shot this man? the whole story is about how she's not a beast like everyone else with the mark is, despite being the highest level (a level ten). Yet she can kill a man with her bare hands on accident? that's almost as bad as when she shot her love interest at close range in the torso because she thought it was someone else. And his injury severely impacts the way the story plays out because she accidentally shot him and they had to call in their location which was a bad thing because Fiona is trying to stay away from those people because they'll take her to the lab (given that she's somehow cured of being a beast) and in their attempts to escape that she gets into more trouble. that's just a personal preference, but did not like that plot point where she accidentally shoots him at all. Also the fact he survived was a miracle. Multiple characters--including himself--were like "yeah no I'm dead. I won't make it." And then he did???

I am just. Absolutely floored by this book. I cannot believe half of the things I read. I think it had a very promising idea, but went in the wrong direction. A bee flu that killed off the honeybee population and spread to humans and started to infect and kill people? They come up with a vaccine for it but only have a limited number? It turns out those who receive it start to become inhuman and loose themselves and are bloodthirsty beasts, the severity of which corresponds to the number of vaccine doses they received (highest is ten)? The world falls apart between the protected and those left to fend for themselves? Cool! What she did with those ideas? Not cool.

There's ideas in there that had great potential, but it was turned into an uncomfortable romance with so many strange elements to the world and the details added that the entire time I was reading I was just amazed that this book really existed, that someone actually wrote it and thought it was a good idea.