Here at school I don't really have anyone I usually eat meals with, so I bring my Kindle and read while I eat so it's not so depressing. Last week I found a free book called "Verita" that I thought sounded interesting, so I got it and I've been reading it. I'm halfway through, and I’m considering stopping, because it’s a terrible book. Really. The author had such an interesting premise, and then she totally blew it with subpar writing and no discernable conflict besides the typical teenage does-he-like-me-does-he-not "conflict". It's sad--it had so much potential! But it was so poorly executed that I can't bring myself to read any more of it.
The premise is this: Scientists have discovered a habitable planet, called Verita, in our galaxy, hundreds of light-years away. Some agency (it’s never fully explained) has devised a way to send people to this planet and populate it. They recruit teenagers to go. They put these volunteers in cryogenic sleep and send them to the planet. En route, they are given the knowledge they need to be cast into specific jobs on Verita. (As an aside, there have been studies done on learning while sleeping. It produces little to no useful learning, so this part of the book is totally innacurate.)
The main character’s name is Brett. She is an extremely intelligent social outcast who was taken into the popular group at her high school by a back-stabbing friend who drops her when her parents die and she has to go into foster care. She has no family and no friends, and so she is recruited to go to Verita. Once there, she becomes entwined with two boys (everyone is high-school aged) who find her attractive. One is on her research team. One is not. She also becomes friends with a perky genius who is a perfect friend. She displays leadership skills and is therefore selected as research team lead. The boy who finds her attractive who is on her team has a problem with that and acts like a pouty little boy about it. The boy who is not on her team who she is sort of dating is hot and cold and gets upset over little things and is controlling and irritating. She also happens to be a perfect swimmer.
I have many problems with this book. The first is the writing. It is not good writing. It is not even so-so
writing. It sounds like a high schooler wrote it. The dialogue is awkward, the
word choices are often inappropriate or redundant, and the expositional parts—she tried to blend
them in. It didn’t work. It’s done in first person present tense. It didn’t work.
The second is the characters. They girls are Mary Sues. I
don’t think Brett was a very good name choice. She is much too perfect. She is
appropriately modest and reluctant to take on the job of team lead but although
she doesn’t think she’s a good leader, she automatically is perfect at leading
and handles everything perfectly. She’s
the best worker on the base, apparently, which is also unrealistic. She calls
herself anti-social, and yet immediately has a wonderful huge group of friends
and two boys falling over themselves to date her. Andi, her friend, is also too
perfect. Too perky, too uninhibited, too nice to “anti-social” Brett. The boys,
Brody and Ryan, are whiney little babies who are only there to make Brett seem
great by comparison and to make her able to whine, “I don’t know why all these
boys are interested in me!”
The third problem I have with this book is the premise. Why is
this a top-secret project? Why did the government assume that the planet was up
for grabs? Why did they choose whiney, emotional teenagers whose brains are not
fully developed? (The author tried to give some crappy explanation about how
they didn’t want to pressure people to procreate immediately, but that doesn’t
cut it. It was a terrible decision for the agency to make and therefore a terrible decision for the author to make.) Why is this planet
just like earth? (The author gave some crappy explanation about how it was
“how earth could have turned out if the evolutionary process was different”.)
Mind you, I could easily suspend disbelief for any of these problems if the
writing weren’t so terrible and the characters so unlikeable and mechanical.
The fourth problem, the problem that tips the scales for me,
is that there is almost no discernible, meaningful conflict. I’m almost halfway
through the book, and the only way Brett has interacted with the new planet is
through some purple hairs that a mysterious creature left her. Brett briefly
“started DNA testing” on those hairs in two paragraphs a few chapters ago. They even went “out
into the field”, collecting data from the area outside camp, and the whole writing time
was spent dwelling on the interactions between the team members. The extent of
the description of the outside world was that “Jake took a lot of pictures of
insects” and “Brett noted a few creatures that didn’t seem big enough to pose a
threat to humans”. The time Brett’s team spent “in the field” was an incredible
opportunity to let the reader get into the planet and get to know the setting,
and the author WASTED it talking about how Ryan was acting childish and Brett
was acting saintly. So far, everything could have taken place in a normal high
school in upper-middle class America and the story wouldn’t lose anything.
I’m extremely disappointed with this book. It had such
promise, but it amounted to nothing. It’s a good thing I didn’t spend any money
on it. And that's the end of my rant. Much love.
ZannaBee
