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emleemay 's review for:
Dark Inside
by Jeyn Roberts
For me, what rescued [b:Dark Inside|10841167|Dark Inside (Dark Inside, #1)|Jeyn Roberts|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327182798s/10841167.jpg|13996404] from getting an extremely negative review was the fast-paced action and adventure, weird creepiness and what Tatiana likes to call "compulsive readability". The book had many faults, which I will go into, and it was on the whole not a great work of dystopian fiction.
Basically, there's this earthquake one day and suddenly people everywhere start acting weird... becoming possessed by a violent rage, turning on their families and friends, searching the streets for new victims to torture and kill... and amongst all this are a few individuals (inc. Mason, Aries, Michael and Clementine) who remain unaffected by this, er, infection or whatever it is. At the beginning, our four protagonists have never met one another, but as fate will have it they eventually come together and their stories begin to entwine.
Every so often the book would stop in it's fast-paced tracks and another mysterious perspective would be heard that is simply called 'Nothing' and reminded me a great deal of the voice of the darkness in the [b:Gone|2536134|Gone (Gone, #1)|Michael Grant|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266904868s/2536134.jpg|2543657] series by [a:Michael Grant|1599723|Michael Grant|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1216331499p2/1599723.jpg]. It is, much to my annoyance, still unclear at the book's close what this 'Nothing' is.
You know, it's all okay. But it has that sense of "oh my god, quick, run from the monsters!" and then they get away and they're all nice and safe and they walk around a corner and "oh my god, more monsters, RUN!!!" And again, as in [b:Divergent|8306857|Divergent (Divergent, #1)|Veronica Roth|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1327873996s/8306857.jpg|13155899], the dystopia is mediocre. I used the following description to try and sum up what I expect a good dystopian novel to be:
Basically, it's where the author imagines a hypothetical world that's usually set in the future and takes a relevent political or social issue or issues and creates a fictional society that could possibly be what might happen if humanity was to follow a certain idea or movement or perhaps even carry on behaving the way they are. For example, failing to improve the world's environmental problems.
So far, that's not what's happening. I will be reading the sequel that I'm sure is coming so perhaps I will be wowed there and realise I was wrong to doubt [a:Jeyn Roberts|4292165|Jeyn Roberts|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1292273727p2/4292165.jpg] ability to create a successful dystopia. So far it all doesn't make sense as to why these people's minds have been hijacked... they're not zombies, if the author had gone down that route she could have used the whole 'cure for cancer gone wrong' thing that's popular today. But an earthquake that makes people get super angry? I'm not seeing the political/social relevance. So here's the five main things that turned me off in this book:
1) 4 POVs
This does not work. I have never known it to work and I have never enjoyed a book with more than two (main) perspectives. In fact, to be honest, I'm not a big fan of multiple perspectives at all. Furthermore, these characters did not have distinct enough voices to allow four different POVs to work, I could only tell them apart by the stuff that happened to them, like "so this is the one who's mum died" and "this is the one who's trying to find her brother", but personality-wise I was clueless.
2) Throwaway Characters
In a way that is exactly opposite to authors like [a:Melina Marchetta|47104|Melina Marchetta|http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1277655889p2/47104.jpg], the author brings many characters into the story who are all unimportant and quickly disregarded. What's the point? There was a bit where Michael teamed up with a group of people he'd met and he spoke effectionately of two of these characters who he referred to as 'the mother' and 'the child'. There's a scene that should have been dramatic and emotional except it wasn't because I couldn't relate to Michael's feelings towards people who I knew only as 'the mother' and 'the child'. There were so many one-dimensional characters in this book.
3) Quickly Pulled Together End
I thought the ending seemed rushed and lacked smoothness for it. All the four protagonists spent the novel doing their own individual things and telling their own stories and then, like lightning, they all just happen to, well, run into one another. It felt to me like the author had not given much thought to their meeting and wanted simply to get it over with, it was weird the way it happened so fast and read a little ridiculously. As with the turning a corner and "oh my god monsters!" thing I mentioned above, it was like: Aries would be running and she'd knock into a guy who says "hi, I'm Mason...blah-de-blah" and then they'd both turn a corner and there'd be another boy and girl who'd say "oh, we're Michael and Clementine" - see what I mean?
4) We've Still No Idea What's Going On
I appreciate that this is probably the start of at least a trilogy, if not an even longer series, and that it would be a stupid idea to tell the readers everything in the first book. But I felt that there was so little given away in this novel that I came away at the end with nothing. We travel through the books with these characters, we witness earthquakes, murders, heartache... and in the end we remain entirely clueless as to what it's all about. You could have given us something!
5) Casual Misogyny
I had to mention this because I thought that it was the most in-my-face annoying fact about the novel. I was sick of hearing the female protagonists apologise by saying "sorry, I'm such a girl". All the time. One of them gets a bit teary and they're apologising for being a girl. And this novel was written by a woman! Come on ladies, KICK ASS! And if you want to cry, don't effin' apologise for it!
Anyway, it could have been a lot better, that's for sure. But there is still potential here and I will wait and see what the sequel brings.
Many thanks to Macmillan Children's Books for kindly providing a copy of this for review.