#testing trilogy

Five Lakes is I believe the newest colony, so it’s still kind of filling itself out, but it’s also tiny. 

“After everything I have seen and done, I’m forced to admit I don’t know exactly who I am.”

Oof. That hits. That hits. Everyone changes as they grow up -- I’m certainly not the same girl I was when I started university, let alone when I started high school. I’ve changed a hundred times, found myself and lost myself and found myself again. And adulthood is fucking terrifying and foreign and NOT ME.

But for Cia, it’s so much more. It’s so much faster. She was smart, but she was so unprepared for the world at large, for hard choices and cruel people and costly mistakes. Or rather -- she was prepared, enough to adapt, but she was unused to it. Now she is way, way too used to it. She’s barely met herself. How can she know who she is anymore? How can she be herself when she is a stranger?

Thoughts. Well. I liked Graduation Day more than I thought, but to be fair that’s in part because I had fairly low expectations to begin with. The intensity and energy is really compelling, and the characters still really resonate for me. 

But. 

There are a lot of buts. 

For one thing, it’s just... slow. I saw it pointed out in a review when I was looking up the relative publication dates of the different books, and I have to agree. Nothing really happens for most of the book; it’s all just talk and planning and explaining and recapping and wondering and worrying. It sort of works, since the emotions still hit throughout, the tension holds, but it just builds and builds and builds as we wait for something to happen.

And then the follow through just... doesn’t really hit. Some of it does. But the talk with Dr. Barnes just feels... disappointing, honestly. Like. Where did it come from? It makes a certain sort of sense, but it’s never really seeded, so the payoff is more confusing than shocking. It’s not that I don’t buy it. I just don’t feel satisfied by it. It feels like an afterthought pieced together in post rather than a planned twist.

And where did Cia go? She’s not cold-blooded, obviously, but she’s practical. She was practical enough to kill Damone. She was practical enough to kill Kerrick and Marin. But not Dr. Barnes, who has been a primary antagonist throughout the story, who needs to die in order to end The Testing and its child-murdering, who she literally came to kill? 

I’m not sure what to make of Stacia and Will, either, or Cia’s assessments of them. Will goes from confident and sometimes cruel, willing to do what it takes to succeed -- to betray his teammates in the third round of The Testing, to shoot and kill in the fourth, to sabotage the skimmers during the Induction -- to doubting those choices, thinking The Testing is wrong, wanting to help Cia end it. Cia chooses not to test Stacia’s loyalties, instead relying on knowing her motivations, and it blows up in her face when Stacia is (repeatedly) disloyal. 

Maybe they’re supposed to show that even Cia, the main character and a natural born leader, can still make mistakes? That she will trust people who are not loyal to her, that she will turn away from people who may prove critical allies? That someone’s history is not their present? But it just feels... sloppy. 

It feels like this book was written with a hella deadline and the focus was on finishing it, not making it good. It does well for the pieces it has. But the pieces just don’t feel like they belong. They feel like they were a surprise to the author too, and not in an “I didn’t expect my characters to do that, they have a mind of their own!” way but in an “Oh shit I only gave Cia three allies but now I need another person to take care of the bombs uhhhh WILL GET IN HERE” way. 

I don’t know that I’d recommend this book generally -- for someone who likes dystopias or puzzles or political manoeuvrings, sure, but I don’t know that it’s a general read. I’d recommend the first book (great!), and the first 15 chapters of the second book (excellent!), but everything after that is meh. The climax is just... well, anti-climactic. The fancy, twisty, shocking, complex ending she tried to pull just... didn’t work. Like a gymnastics routine, you can throw in all the fancy flips you like, but if you fall off the balance beam, you probably won’t place.

I do love this series. It’s a fairly different style of dystopia, and I love the cleverness and brainteasers and political machinations. It hits a lot of my buttons. But it just doesn’t bring it home in the end. 

Anyways, I’ll start First Test either tomorrow or Sunday. Kel is another very talented leader in a situation that does not want her to be. I wonder if there’ll be some interesting opportunities to contrast?

Tomas wants to stay. He wants to leave the place that is so full of hurt and shame and death. He wants to come home, to stay home, to work in the place that he loves with the people that he loves. The people that he trusts.

Cia wants to stay too, for the same reasons... but she also doesn’t. She doesn’t want to leave behind the people who let this happen, or the people who are a product of the old system. She doesn’t want to be removed from the stories that are being told, the work that is being done, the system that is being built, the power that is being wielded. She doesn’t want that power, but she has learned not to trust the people who have it.

Tomas killed Stacia. He says in self-defense. Cia doesn’t entirely believe that. I think she may underestimate what self-defense is -- if Stacia cannot be trusted, then she is a threat to Tomas. Sometimes a preemptive strike is still self-defense. That doesn’t always make it okay, but it still technically fits the definition.