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A review by missuskisses
Panic by Lauren Oliver
1.0
Review at http://bennitheblog.com/bookbiters/panic-by-lauren-oliver/
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Applied to the world of publishing, that means for every The Hunger Games, we get countless inferior knockoffs. Panic, unfortunately, is one such knockoff.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with knockoffs. Though Suzanne Collins insists she was inspired by modern warfare and the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, The Hunger Games itself was compared to Koushun Takami’s excellent and brutal social commentary, Battle Royale. Lauren Oliver similarly insists she was inspired by “The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was,” though I see less resemblance to the Grimm fairy tale than to The Hunger Games. That said, I’d read a hundred The Hunger Games and Battle Royale knockoffs if they were as well-written and thought-provoking as those two.
Panic is neither well-written nor thought-provoking; it could at times, however, prove snicker-inducing—candy bar pun intended. Panic takes the “hunger” in The Hunger Games to new levels, serving countless food similes:
Let’s throw in some slut-shaming for good measure, too. But don’t forget the cheese.
No, these aren’t uses of the Meat-O-Vision trope.
I haven’t read all of Lauren Oliver’s books, but my impression from reading Delirium was that for all Ms. Oliver lacked in plotting and pacing, she made up with palpable mood and lyrical passages. A poet laureate of teenage angst and longing, if you will. Here’s a sample from Delirium:
Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That’s what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.
If I were to ask Ms. Oliver to write a The Hunger Games-inspired book, it wouldn’t be set during an actual Game. I would ask her, instead, to imagine how two people like Annie Cresta and Finnick Odair found love in the aftermath of the Games.
This mismatch of author to content has me convinced that the food similes found in Panic aren’t unintended comedy but rather a calculated, coded cry for help. Someone locked Ms. Oliver in a room and forced her to write a The Hunger Games copycat, slipping meager food through a slot in exchange for typewritten pages.
It’s a shame that any real-life tension—admittedly existing solely in my imagination—fails to translate onto the page. Heather enters the “Panic” contest primarily because she feels despondent after her boyfriend dumps her. That she later realizes the winnings could really help her and her little sister against their irresponsible mother (hello Katniss!) is not enough for us to root for her.
The game itself likewise inspires no excitement, though it may inspire head-scratching. “Panic,” as a game, makes no sense. Many dystopian competitions don’t, but the more distinct the world, the more we’re able to suspend our disbelief and interpret the story as commentary. Setting “Panic” in a world almost identical to our own, then, only highlights the game’s inadequacies.
As an example of how the setup is out-of-touch with reality: The town of Carp is depressed and poor, but each high school student has to contribute a dollar a school day to the “Panic” pot. If they do not, at best their lockers are vandalized, at worst their faces pummeled. Even though Heather may feel sometimes “like her stomach might drop out her butt” (yes, an actual quote from the book), no amount of face pummeling will make force money to drop out of someone’s butt. A dollar a day may sound like a pittance for the “haves,” but for the “have nots,” the Carp residents who live on “Meth Row” or in their mothers’ car, a dollar a day per student is quite substantial, and collecting such a sum on a daily basis is likely downright impossible.
Questionable funding methods aside, the actual tasks required by “Panic” remind me of hearing an inside joke as an outsider: a group of friends recount their hijinks, stuttering in fragments and breaking down in laughter, while you stand there and politely smile. When you ask a question to try to make sense of it all, the friends simply chuckle, “Trust me; you had to be there.” Jumping off a ridge into the ocean, walking on a beam in the rain, stealing crap from a drunk but armed old man: I’m sure the contestants’ hearts were pounding, but an exhilarating personal experience doesn’t translate into an exciting read.
It doesn’t help that just as the competition grows more dangerous, the stakes are immediately lowered, thanks to a twist that only highlights how poorly “Panic” was designed. It also doesn’t help that none of the main competitors earn our sympathy. As discussed earlier, our first impression of Heather is that she places her heartbreak ahead of much more pressing matters. Heather’s best friend, Nat, uses people without any loss of friendship, and she somehow convinces people to split potential winnings with her after she injures herself. She’d have to be a heck of a lot more delicious than a Christmas-iced cookie or an exotic Popsicle to convince me. A turducken dressed with Rocky Road ice cream and decorated with seasoned curly fries and freshly popped corn instead, maybe? Lastly, Dodge, a victim of Nat’s charms, is no more sympathetic than the women—he single-mindedly plots a revenge for which the intended consequences far outweigh the original offense.
The best thing about Panic is that it’s . . . not long.
So far, since its March 2014 release date, Panic has been marketed as a standalone novel, as opposed to the first in a series. Since Panic has all the trappings of a shameless, bandwagoning cash grab (also optioned for film prior to its release), readers are justly suspicious of that it will remain a standalone. Let’s hope Panic stays solo so that Lauren Oliver can return to more original stories that play to her strengths, so that she will be inspired to write sentences more eloquent—or at least more tasteful—than this: “Now it looked like a person whose soul had been sucked out through his asshole: collapsed and desperate, wild and wide-eyed, sagging in the middle.”
Her readers deserve better.
Review at http://bennitheblog.com/bookbiters/panic-by-lauren-oliver/
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Applied to the world of publishing, that means for every The Hunger Games, we get countless inferior knockoffs. Panic, unfortunately, is one such knockoff.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with knockoffs. Though Suzanne Collins insists she was inspired by modern warfare and the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, The Hunger Games itself was compared to Koushun Takami’s excellent and brutal social commentary, Battle Royale. Lauren Oliver similarly insists she was inspired by “The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was,” though I see less resemblance to the Grimm fairy tale than to The Hunger Games. That said, I’d read a hundred The Hunger Games and Battle Royale knockoffs if they were as well-written and thought-provoking as those two.
Panic is neither well-written nor thought-provoking; it could at times, however, prove snicker-inducing—candy bar pun intended. Panic takes the “hunger” in The Hunger Games to new levels, serving countless food similes:
Avery was only five foot one, and standing next to her made Heather feel like the Jolly Green Giant on a can of corn.
[Avery had] once overheard Heather call her 'shrimp-faced' and had obviously never forgiven her. Avery did, however, look somewhat shrimplike, all tight and pink, so Heather didn’t feel that bad about it.
Nat was even cuter when she blushed. She looked like a cookie that had been iced for Christmas.
[Nat’s] hair was fixed low, in a side ponytail, and she was wearing a ruffled yellow jumper-type thing, with the shirt and shorts attached, that would have looked stupid on anyone else. But on her it looked amazing, like she was some kind of life-size, exotic Popsicle.
Let’s throw in some slut-shaming for good measure, too. But don’t forget the cheese.
“She’s a whore,” Nat said matter-of-factly. “Bet she gives him herpes. Or worse.”
“Worse than herpes?” Heather said doubtfully.
“Syphilis. Turns you into a moron. Puts holes in the brain, swiss-cheese-style . . . May [Delaney’s syphilis] turn Matt Hepley’s brain to delicious, gooey cheese.”
No, these aren’t uses of the Meat-O-Vision trope.
I haven’t read all of Lauren Oliver’s books, but my impression from reading Delirium was that for all Ms. Oliver lacked in plotting and pacing, she made up with palpable mood and lyrical passages. A poet laureate of teenage angst and longing, if you will. Here’s a sample from Delirium:
Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That’s what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.
If I were to ask Ms. Oliver to write a The Hunger Games-inspired book, it wouldn’t be set during an actual Game. I would ask her, instead, to imagine how two people like Annie Cresta and Finnick Odair found love in the aftermath of the Games.
This mismatch of author to content has me convinced that the food similes found in Panic aren’t unintended comedy but rather a calculated, coded cry for help. Someone locked Ms. Oliver in a room and forced her to write a The Hunger Games copycat, slipping meager food through a slot in exchange for typewritten pages.
It’s a shame that any real-life tension—admittedly existing solely in my imagination—fails to translate onto the page. Heather enters the “Panic” contest primarily because she feels despondent after her boyfriend dumps her. That she later realizes the winnings could really help her and her little sister against their irresponsible mother (hello Katniss!) is not enough for us to root for her.
The game itself likewise inspires no excitement, though it may inspire head-scratching. “Panic,” as a game, makes no sense. Many dystopian competitions don’t, but the more distinct the world, the more we’re able to suspend our disbelief and interpret the story as commentary. Setting “Panic” in a world almost identical to our own, then, only highlights the game’s inadequacies.
As an example of how the setup is out-of-touch with reality: The town of Carp is depressed and poor, but each high school student has to contribute a dollar a school day to the “Panic” pot. If they do not, at best their lockers are vandalized, at worst their faces pummeled. Even though Heather may feel sometimes “like her stomach might drop out her butt” (yes, an actual quote from the book), no amount of face pummeling will make force money to drop out of someone’s butt. A dollar a day may sound like a pittance for the “haves,” but for the “have nots,” the Carp residents who live on “Meth Row” or in their mothers’ car, a dollar a day per student is quite substantial, and collecting such a sum on a daily basis is likely downright impossible.
Questionable funding methods aside, the actual tasks required by “Panic” remind me of hearing an inside joke as an outsider: a group of friends recount their hijinks, stuttering in fragments and breaking down in laughter, while you stand there and politely smile. When you ask a question to try to make sense of it all, the friends simply chuckle, “Trust me; you had to be there.” Jumping off a ridge into the ocean, walking on a beam in the rain, stealing crap from a drunk but armed old man: I’m sure the contestants’ hearts were pounding, but an exhilarating personal experience doesn’t translate into an exciting read.
It doesn’t help that just as the competition grows more dangerous, the stakes are immediately lowered, thanks to a twist that only highlights how poorly “Panic” was designed. It also doesn’t help that none of the main competitors earn our sympathy. As discussed earlier, our first impression of Heather is that she places her heartbreak ahead of much more pressing matters. Heather’s best friend, Nat, uses people without any loss of friendship, and she somehow convinces people to split potential winnings with her after she injures herself. She’d have to be a heck of a lot more delicious than a Christmas-iced cookie or an exotic Popsicle to convince me. A turducken dressed with Rocky Road ice cream and decorated with seasoned curly fries and freshly popped corn instead, maybe? Lastly, Dodge, a victim of Nat’s charms, is no more sympathetic than the women—he single-mindedly plots a revenge for which the intended consequences far outweigh the original offense.
The best thing about Panic is that it’s . . . not long.
So far, since its March 2014 release date, Panic has been marketed as a standalone novel, as opposed to the first in a series. Since Panic has all the trappings of a shameless, bandwagoning cash grab (also optioned for film prior to its release), readers are justly suspicious of that it will remain a standalone. Let’s hope Panic stays solo so that Lauren Oliver can return to more original stories that play to her strengths, so that she will be inspired to write sentences more eloquent—or at least more tasteful—than this: “Now it looked like a person whose soul had been sucked out through his asshole: collapsed and desperate, wild and wide-eyed, sagging in the middle.”
Her readers deserve better.
Review at http://bennitheblog.com/bookbiters/panic-by-lauren-oliver/