I had high expectations for this novel which was described as ‘The Last of Us’ meets ‘Hunger Games’, but sadly it didn’t live up to the hype for me.
It’s a dual perspective novel featuring Inesa, a seventeen year old taxidermist, who is forced into running the Lamb’s Gauntlet, a live-streamed hunt to the death, and her pursuer Melinoë, a prosthetically enhanced product of the Caerus corporation which controls all aspects of community life.
Reid has given us a glimpse into a world which is all too plausible. Nuclear conflicts, mutations and rising water levels have made life hard for those who live in the countryside around New Amsterdam (New York) whereas those in the city have a much better lifestyle which their provincial cousins can only envy.
Inesa’s mother has racked up an enormous amount of debt and nominates her to run the Gauntlet to pay them off. To survive Inesa has to avoid death at the hands of Melinoë for thirteen days. She is aided in the beginning by her younger brother, Luca and the goodwill of the people of her settlement who she has always tried to help.
Meanwhile Melinoë is battling her own demons. Having frozen during a previous Gauntlet, she has been reprogrammed and is now dealing with memory loss, unwanted surgical alterations to her body and the loss of a potential partner whose memory has been wiped in order to make her a perfect wife for a high-level company executive.
As they are forced to confront each other and then begin to help each other a strong bond develops between them.
The first person perspective gives the novel a tightly focussed feel and is used very effectively.
My feelings (and a slight spoiler)
I was dissatisfied at the end of this book. While the eventual outcomes for the two girls were in keeping with the story, they didn’t work for me. Both girls had shown some degree of heroism but their sacrifices went unrewarded. The villains were also one-dimensional. The faceless corporation didn’t need to have any redeeming factors, but the CEO of Caerus and Melinoë’s handler should have been more complex and believable. In ‘The Hunger Games‘ President Snow is a dreadful person, yet he has some substance and from the first book we suspect that there is more to him than meets the eye. I’d have been disappointed if Melinoë had been given a happy ending as her crimes were too heinous, but I feel that Inesa should have been treated better. It’s published by Penguin and I’m surprised that it wasn’t edited to make it more satisfying.
Even the queer angle was unrewarding. Yes, it might be a relief to young queer girls to know that they aren’t alone in their feelings, but the fact that the relationship is disapproved of within both girls’ communities isn’t going to do those young queer girls any favours. This is taking lesbian fiction back to the 1950’s where the only acceptable ending was an unhappy one unless she converted to being straight!
I checked the definition of fable and found that it is ‘a succinct story with a moral lesson’, e.g. ‘Slow and steady wins the race’ so I tried to work out what the moral lesson was in this book. ‘Don’t buy things on credit’, ‘Look after the planet‘ and ‘Watching live-streamed snuff films is bad’ were the most obvious, but these are hardly ground breaking revelations.
All in all, this was the most disappointing book I’ve read in a long time.
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