The Darkest Minds, by Alexandra Bracken -- SPOILERS
Actual rating: 3.5 stars
Cover Story: Mysterious insignia is mysterious.
YA book covers. It’s either a freakish close-up of a blandly pretty face, a wispy girl in an inappropriate dress, or a cryptic abstract symbol. If I had to pick one, I’d pick the latter, because at least it doesn’t turn me off like a big face does. (A big face screams, “I can’t read this in public!”) This one has stand-out colors and repeated mentions of the symbol in the text, so I’m OK with it.
First Line: “When the White Noise went off, we were in the Garden, pulling weeds.”
The Deal: Ruby grows up in a world where turning ten years old is not a cause for celebration, but despair. More than half of her class has died, and it isn’t just a local phenomenon: the plague has struck the entire US. Instead of dying, Ruby is one of the few who develop special powers. The government has helpfully come up with a classification system (as they do) and assigned the survivors colors based on their powers. They also helpfully round up all the super-charged preteens and put them into “rehabilitation” camps, but it turns out that putting all the super-charged preteens together isn’t a crackerjack idea, so the government disappears all of the kids with the most dangerous powers. Ruby has been in Thurmond, the most notorious camp of all, for six years, having convinced everyone that she’s a harmless Green (extra smart code-breakers). With the help of a mysterious group called the Children’s League, she breaks out of Thurmond, but their plans for her aren’t any more innocent. She ends up with a small group of teens searching for a promised safe haven, but the closer she grows to them, the more she worries they’ll discover her big secret: she’s actually an Orange (mind control) who fears her powers ever since she accidentally erased herself from her best friend’s memory.
Awesome Things: Color-coded superpowers. Use of the word “psi’. Government conspiracies. Anti-government conspiracies. Memory altering (“When do I get my own flashy-thing memory-messer-upper?”). Terrible things happening to parents. (Seriously, the scene where Ruby remembers what happened to her parents? Gut wrenching). Watership Down. Road trips. Black Betty. Living in an abandoned warehouse store and raiding it for pink girly clothes. Idyllic safe havens that come with a sneaky Price. The name Clancy.
Style & Substance: This is so, so different from Bracken’s first novel, a high fantasy named Brightly Woven (aside from the insistence that magic be color-coded, as it is in both books). While I enjoyed this one, and I think her writing is stronger and more sure, I have to admit that I still like Brightly Woven more - maybe because at the time high fantasy/romance didn’t feel as overdone as dystopia/romance does these days, and maybe because I am a sucker for the unreliable, wily, tragic hero, and maybe because I think the weaving-based magic system is still more inventive than mysterious plague powers. Maybe it is just a haze of romantic nostalgia, since I read Brightly Woven so long ago.
My favorite parts of this book involved the little family Ruby, Liam, Chubs, and Zu (and Black Betty) make up while they’re on the road. I love that it develops organically - that they all have to learn to trust each other and that it’s not easy. I love the little character details, like Zu’s love of girly things, and Chubs’s clandestine reading (and his interest in sewing), and Liam’s protective gentlemanliness. I love the moments of friction in the group, such as the moments when Chubs gets fed up with being the butt of Liam’s teasing. Their relationships ground the more intense, exciting parts of the story, and Bracken does an excellent job foreshadowing the ominous truth at the heart of the safe haven by describing how the characters pull away from each other through Clancey’s subtle manipulation.
Bracken also gets kudos for making the (many) flashback scenes just as compelling as the present-day part of the story. A lot of the set up has to do with the characters’ secrets - what happened to their families, what happened when their powers got out of control, what they suffered through in the camps and after their escapes. The scenes about Ruby’s parents and the rest of the group’s first escape from their rehabilitation camp are particularly gripping.
Like many firsts in a series, there is a LOT of set up in this book. There’s the plague, which is as yet unexplained and somehow weirdly only in the US. There’s the search for the hidden safe haven. There’s Children’s League agents after Ruby. There’s the skiptracers (government-hired bounty hunters) after them all. There’s letters to parents they have to deliver on behalf of fallen friends. There’s the mysterious disappearance of the Reds and Oranges, who might be experiments or might be a secret army or might be dead. There’s Chubs’s parents and their anti-government work. There’s Clancy Gray and his father, the president, and some twisty, Graceling-Leck-inspired memory games. There’s a sweet and an icky side to a love triangle. It all ties together by the end (well, except for undefined world-building issues that remind me of what I disliked in Wither, which I’m reserving judgment on) and there’s a lot of momentum going in to the second book.
Not-Awesome Things: Clancy, Clancy, Clancy. Did anyone not see that coming? I actually think Bracken played it as well and subtly as she could, but still. He did not have much dimension as a villain. Also, the ending. Hate the ending. Hate the memory wipe. Hate the way Ruby justifies it. It’s one of my least favorite plots: the “I must do this terrible thing to do against your wishes because I want to protect you and I am a presumptuous ass who knows better and I’m sure this is going to do the trick and not going to come back and bite me on the ass” plot. It’s the most obvious route for the story to go and it undercuts all of the fabulous character development Ruby does up until that point, where she actually seems to understand when Liam explains to her earlier why he would always rather have the bad memories. He did say that, right, I’m not imagining it? As a sacrifice, it’s not noble; it’s selfishness disguised as noble; it’s self-serving.
Maybe that’s the point, though. The things I hate about this particular trope may be something that others love. It’s dramatic and tragic but, for me, too easy, a dues ex machina. (For the record, I also hate body-swap stories and stories of mistaken identity. I just find them so frustrating I can barely stand it.) Bracken gets kudos for making me angry, at least, since that means I’m invested in the characters, but it also means that I might rage quit the series depending on how the second one goes. Will she take this all the way and force Ruby and Liam to start over as strangers for the rest of the series, or will it be more like Sophie Jordan’s Vanish, where the mind-wipe slips away when it’s most convenient?
You Should Read This: If you liked X-Men: First Class because it focused more on the mutants as young adults. If you’re looking for another solid teen dystopia. If you’re willing to buy sudden, unexplainable plagues targeted at highly specific age groups. If you’ve ever color-coded anything. If you like thinking about whether it would be better to hang on to bad memories or erase them.
Also Read: Other teen dystopias involving diseases, such as Legend, Wither, Delirium, The Eleventh Plague. Other teen dystopias involving dangerous paranormal powers, like Shatter Me (if you can stand it). Bracken’s other book, Brightly Woven, to marvel over how different it is.
Also Watch: X-Men: First Class. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Push. Chronicle. (OK, I haven’t seen those last two, but you have to admit they fit, right?)
I reserve the right to add to this when I think of more stuff. Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to read the eARC.