XVI by Julia Karr (2011)
My synopsis (no spoilers):
XVI is a dystopian novel about Nina, a girl who is afraid to turn 16. This is because when a girl turns 16 (or "sex-teen" as the book repeatedly calls it), she is tattoed with a 'XVI' that declares her to be of legal age. She's basically fair game. Since the world includes a strictly-govt controlled caste system, upper-tier people can do practically anything to lower tier girls with impunity. Nina's life is torn apart when her mother is killed and secrets about her past are exposed.
Comments:
I wanted to like this book so much. The concept has such promise. The author could have talked about rape culture, about restrictive governments, about the class system and how it serves to reinforce a cycle of oppression and privilege. Instead of delving into these themes in an intelligent way, the book is sex-negative, repetitive and boring.
The author does a lot of telling instead of showing. This seems to be an affliction of first-person narratives and it makes reading boring. For instance, when Nina's mother dies, we know practically nothing about her. So it's hard to care about her death, no matter how sad we are told to feel because Nina basically narrates, 'I am sad' over and over at you.
The plot plods aling (I got to page 120 and skipped 50 pages ahead....nothing new had happened). Nothing happens for huge swathes of the book and, instead of focusing on world- or character-building, the author just fills pages with the minutia of Nina's daily life. The characters all feel wooden, even Nina, who flip-flops between being a fairly radical thinker to toeing the party line whenever the author needs her to. The other characters are shallow, as is the ever-present "romance."
The big "reveal"--that Nina's father is still alive and that her parents are involved in an anti-govt group--was obvious from practically the first page. But nothing they do makes sense in light of this. Why did Nina's dad think faking his death would protect his family, since the family was always under suspicion anyway? Why didn't anyone tell Nina anything about her life? Why all this secrecy?
The Big Bad of the book, Ed, is bad because he beats Nina's mom. BUT WE NEVER SEE THIS. Worse, we don't meet him until 2/3 of the way through the book. What we know of him is through secondary sources. And again, the plot doesn't make sense: Nina's mom has an affair with him because her husband (Nina's father) has faked his own death to avoid placing suspicion on his family for their anti-govt activities. But Ed knows that Ginny (the mother) is anti-gov and suspects that the husband is still alive. So what is the point of them being together again? *sigh*
The cardinal crime of the book is that, instead of using the opportunity to discuss rape culture and the subjugation of women, the author either victim-blames (through characters talking about what Nina's friend, Sandy, wears or who take a 'boys will be boys' attitude) or seems to blame the desire for adolescents to want to have sex, rather than the culture that objectifies and disempowers them. This might seem like hair-splitting but to me, an ex-fundamentalist, the book felt like some fundagelical nightmare of "This is what will happen when teens are allowed to have sex!!!1!!" There is a way to write a book about rape-culture that doesn't condemn all teen sex as dangerous. This book doesn't do it.
TL;DR: Do not read this book. It is a waste of a night you could spend re-reading 'Hunger Games.'
XVI is a dystopian novel about Nina, a girl who is afraid to turn 16. This is because when a girl turns 16 (or "sex-teen" as the book repeatedly calls it), she is tattoed with a 'XVI' that declares her to be of legal age. She's basically fair game. Since the world includes a strictly-govt controlled caste system, upper-tier people can do practically anything to lower tier girls with impunity. Nina's life is torn apart when her mother is killed and secrets about her past are exposed.
Comments:
I wanted to like this book so much. The concept has such promise. The author could have talked about rape culture, about restrictive governments, about the class system and how it serves to reinforce a cycle of oppression and privilege. Instead of delving into these themes in an intelligent way, the book is sex-negative, repetitive and boring.
The author does a lot of telling instead of showing. This seems to be an affliction of first-person narratives and it makes reading boring. For instance, when Nina's mother dies, we know practically nothing about her. So it's hard to care about her death, no matter how sad we are told to feel because Nina basically narrates, 'I am sad' over and over at you.
The plot plods aling (I got to page 120 and skipped 50 pages ahead....nothing new had happened). Nothing happens for huge swathes of the book and, instead of focusing on world- or character-building, the author just fills pages with the minutia of Nina's daily life. The characters all feel wooden, even Nina, who flip-flops between being a fairly radical thinker to toeing the party line whenever the author needs her to. The other characters are shallow, as is the ever-present "romance."
The big "reveal"--that Nina's father is still alive and that her parents are involved in an anti-govt group--was obvious from practically the first page. But nothing they do makes sense in light of this. Why did Nina's dad think faking his death would protect his family, since the family was always under suspicion anyway? Why didn't anyone tell Nina anything about her life? Why all this secrecy?
The Big Bad of the book, Ed, is bad because he beats Nina's mom. BUT WE NEVER SEE THIS. Worse, we don't meet him until 2/3 of the way through the book. What we know of him is through secondary sources. And again, the plot doesn't make sense: Nina's mom has an affair with him because her husband (Nina's father) has faked his own death to avoid placing suspicion on his family for their anti-govt activities. But Ed knows that Ginny (the mother) is anti-gov and suspects that the husband is still alive. So what is the point of them being together again? *sigh*
The cardinal crime of the book is that, instead of using the opportunity to discuss rape culture and the subjugation of women, the author either victim-blames (through characters talking about what Nina's friend, Sandy, wears or who take a 'boys will be boys' attitude) or seems to blame the desire for adolescents to want to have sex, rather than the culture that objectifies and disempowers them. This might seem like hair-splitting but to me, an ex-fundamentalist, the book felt like some fundagelical nightmare of "This is what will happen when teens are allowed to have sex!!!1!!" There is a way to write a book about rape-culture that doesn't condemn all teen sex as dangerous. This book doesn't do it.
TL;DR: Do not read this book. It is a waste of a night you could spend re-reading 'Hunger Games.'