The Darkest Minds: A Book Review
A year ago in August, I purchased a copy of The Darkest Minds by Alexandra Bracken.
It is a Young Adult Dystopian novel about teenagers who due to IAAN, or Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration, either die on impact or develop supernatural abilities. Those who die are buried and mourned. Those who live present a grave threat to humanity.
But those who live are presented with a grave threat from humanity.
It was very hard for this book to be perfect, since it kind of forces the readers to take the side of the teenagers, even though many of the teens who develop the special abilities end up being blood-thirsty maniacs bent on mind control, electricity control, and making things and places start on fire.
But what's the alternative? Concentration camps. The government, led by the evil and nefarious President Gray, sees concentration camps as the solution to the problem.
Such it is that our protagonist, Ruby, is plucked from her happy home life at the first signs of IAAN, also called Everhart's Disease, and placed in Thurmond, a concentration camp that is located in her homestate of Virginia.
But Ruby is a good person. Maybe we can't trust all teenagers. But we can trust her.
There are several different types of special abilities; or more to the point, different categories. There are blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. The color that their eyes glow is indicative of what type of mutant ability the teens have acquired.
Ruby, being an orange, has the ability to read memories and control minds, through the power of suggestion. This is how she avoids undergoing a test in the hospital wing. She gets the man trying to read her eye color to put down the test, much like Obi-Wan Kenobe managed to persuade the guard to let him and Luke Skywalker through in Star Wars. But if she gets found out, discovered for who she is, and especially revealed for what she's done, she's dead.
So we are rooting for her to escape with Cate, a nurse who is a mole for the Children's League. But oh, Cate is an adult. And it seems as though we can't trust, really, any adult characters in this story. Another factor that makes me feel to some extent alienated from the narrative.
Even though Ruby reads in the minds of Cate and her boyfriend Rob that they have blood on their hands from some of the kids they've run tests on, we are depending on the Children's League as the Deus Ex Machina to get Ruby out of her god-forsaken concentration camp setting.
But this is only the climax to the first act. Once out, she realizes that she's really in it for herself. And she decides to head out on the run. The other orange with her, a creepy boy named Martin, seems ready to kill to earn his keep. Such is the future that Ruby would be faced if she were to side with the Children's League. She'd be conscripted to take out government officials, Psi Special forces, and skip-tracers. They're effectively terrorists. So she would have to kill or be killed.
Oh man, I just got very inside sports there with my references. Such is the case with any dystopian futuristic novel. There's a learning curve. And it took me about a year to read this book from the day I first cracked it to the day I finished, with most of that done between May and August.
Government officials under the jurisdiction of President Gray make sure that there are no teens roaming the streets. Pretty much, all children once they reach the age of ten develop the Everhart's Disease. So most all children who are lucky enough to still be above ground are stuck in concentration camps like Thurmond. The ones who aren't either were freed by the Children's League, and work for them, or they live in clans, groups, or communities off the grid in the wilderness.
Psi Special Forces are basically like the Peacekeepers in The Hunger Games. They guard the Concentration Camps. They follow the blinkers or chip readers that the kids have with them or on them. I think they're embedded in their skin? Again, kind of like The Hunger Games, when the tributes have tracers injected into their skin. But Ruby avoids having one of those things, because Cate helps her escape.
Then there are the Skip Tracers. Not to be confused with tracers, the Skip Tracers. They are mercenary arms for hire who drive the backroads in their ramshackle pick-up trucks, looking for kids who have escaped from the concentration camps, in the hopes of turning them over to Psi special forces for a huge bounty.
And such it is that she runs. Ruby's only hope is the little girl she finds inside the abandoned gas station, collecting food for the two friends she has. Ruby chases her all the way back to the black van.
This sets off the much more interesting second act.
She encounters some "Lost Boys," as it were.... and a Lost Girl. There's Liam, a fellow teenager suffering from IAAN. He broke out of Caledonia, a concentration camp in Ohio. There's Chubbs, nickname for Charles, who also broke out of Caledonia... and still grieves the loss of his friend, James Fields.... to the point of obsession with finding his father, and delivering a letter from James that was entrusted with him when they made their great escape. Then there's Zu, short for Suzume.... the girl that Ruby scares within an inch of her life. she's barely a pre-teen.... and has seen far more suffering than any person of her tender age should. Their prison break resulted in mass fatalities.
But there it is.... Ruby has joined up with Liam, Chubbs, and Zu, having outrun the Children's League at an abandoned gas station. They hit the road in their van, Black Betty, with hopes of making it to the East River. The East River, not necessarily a river, is as legend has it, the settlement where an alleged "Skip Kid" is staying. The Skip Kid is a legend of a kid who escapes from the clutches of the Concentration Camps. I'm not sure why Alexandra Bracken builds up one particular kid to have so much clout as an aforementioned Skip Kid, since there are other kids who succeeded in getting out of the camps. But apparently he used his special powers to do so.
I think a prevailing theme of The Darkest Minds is you can't really trust anybody. You can't trust the president. (That rings true, and this book was published before Trump took office.) When you can't trust youth to control their power and abilities, you have to lock them up. (Unfortunately, this rings true today too, since the president has moved to detain children for more than twenty days in the detention centers which are coming dangerously close to becoming concentration camps. America has got to regain its moral compass and vote otherwise in November of 2020, but I'll save that for another entry). You want to trust your parents, but they've drunk the kool-aid and are letting the government take their kids, because they need to be "treated" and "rehabilitated" at hospitals. You want to trust the Children's League, but when Ruby succeeds in accessing the memories of Rob, the boyfriend of Cate, she sees that he pulled a gun on a girl in a moment when she wasn't using her powers, and didn't hesitate to pull the trigger.
Liam, Chubbs, and Suzume seem like the last bastion of trust for Ruby. She really can't trust anyone else but them. They don't immediately take to her. Chubbs in particular is skeptical. He'd completely shut her out if he found out she were actually an "orange." She passes herself off as a "green," less of a dangerous young person. But she does help them interpret the numbers in a message to mean the frequency number for a radio station, and that radio station turns out to be giving hidden subliminal messages to the teenagers who have been lucky enough to escape. (Apparently as a green, she's supposed to be able to work with numbers, cryptography and the like). I think that Ruby kind of pulls a Frank W. Abagnale Junior (Just saw Catch Me if You Can The Musical) and passes herself off as a green, lying to them for what she thinks the numbers mean, but then somehow manages to effectively put the letter number cryptogram together to help find the radio station, which does in fact lead them to the East River Settlement.
Here, things get interesting. There's this guy who runs the settlement. I don't want to give away too much about him. He goes by Clancy. I remember that, because Clancy's is the brand of Pretzel Sticks we found at Aldi to have in our green room during Sister Act. Clancy can help Ruby develop her special abilities. But it gets creepy, because Clancy's obviously a little bit older than Ruby, who's a normal sixteen year old girl.
Also, she's already got strong feelings for Liam. And Liam's not without strong feelings for Ruby, that's obvious!!
What should Ruby do? Liam wants to make it on his own. He wants to take his chances away from the East River crowd. Zu wants to go to California. Chubbs is eager to get out and deliver the letter to Jack's family. Ruby wants to find her grandma. Maybe she'd like to reunite with her parents, but something happened to her parents' memory. We learned in a very sad flashback that Zu wound up in Thurmond after her own parents turned her in. They called the police on her when they didn't recognize her. She woke up on the morning of her tenth birthday, thinking she was going to get the chocolate chip pancakes that she traditionally gets on her birthday. Her parents had gotten in a huge fight the night before, resulting in the throwing of things, breaking of things, and destruction of their living room. The mom and dad could not disagree upon the best way to help treat Ruby's inevitable IAAN diagnosis. Ruby begs her parents to remember who she is when she comes down to the kitchen. They see her as a home invasion. Ruby's dad is more compassionate than the mom at that juncture, and takes her out to the garage to wait for a police officer. The mom has no memory of her whatsoever. If the Psi Special Forces hadn't beaten the police there, maybe the parents would have shown some compassion to the stranger and gotten her to a safe house. But she instead wound up in Thurmond.
And the fact that she thinks her special abilities accidentally erased the memories her parents had of her leads to her reluctance to seek them out first. But she has her own reasons to break out from the East River. Her grandma may remember her. And when Zu takes off, she wants to find her.
Leaving the East River group, though, means she may never fully finish the training she's started with Clancy, the power to harness her abilities.
At human touch, much like Rogue in X-Men, she can cause damage. At one point earlier in the story, we saw how she used power of suggestion and a little bit of telekinesis to cause a car accident when the four of them were pursued through the countryside of West Virginia by skip tracers and the Children's League. She causes a skip tracer car to go right off the road.
She's worried that just the tender touch of Liam will cause her to lose control of her abilities and do something to harm him.
Is this book inside sports? You bet it is. Did it take a long time to catch up with the terminology? Absolutely it did, and this is the first book. Huge learning curve. I'd start to root for a character, and no sooner learn that they had ulterior motives. I'd root against a villain, and then realize that these teenagers, unharnessed, could do a huge amount of collateral damage in addition to hurting the villains. (See X-Men: Dark Phoenix). I liked the book, ultimately, because even when Ruby ended up in a love triangle with two boys, and one of the boys was so very obviously wrong for her, the right boy never lost his faith in her, never blamed her, never wanted to give up on saving her. In other words, that particular boy was heavily reminiscent of Peeta to Ruby's Katniss.
Will Ruby ever fully develop and control her mind control and telekinetic powers? Will she be able to trust the community of kids at East River? Is the "Slip Kid" good or evil? And who will win out? Liam, who just wants to get out and have a high school life that he's missed coming of age in a concentration camp? Maybe find his brother, who also had to work for a period of time for the Children's League, and saw some of the horrible things that Liam did? He wanted Liam to not have to kill teachers, students, and public servants, so he helped Liam get out of that situation. Or will Clancy prevail, the mysterious orange with more than a little romantic interest in Ruby, who would spare nothing to develop his own abilities? And spare nobody if they dared attempt to leave the community to which they'd pledge allegiance? (East River is kind of to Thurmond what District 13 was to the Capitol.... an alternative to evil that turns out to be another catastrophe in the making.)
The Darkest Minds did evoke The Hunger Games in its better moments. Will I go on to read the second book, Never Fade? I kind of feel like I have to, now that Alexandra Bracken left us in a cliffhanger.
In the meantime, though, I am taking a break from dystopian and gravitating toward human interest and biographical stories. I am reading "The Chris Farley Show" by Tom Farley, Jr. and Tanner Colby. Planning to find "Unqualified" by Anna Faris, "Grateful American" by Gary Sinise, "Every Day is Extra" by John Kerry, and "Someday" By David Levithan. Want to give "Choose Your Own Autobiography" by Neil Patrick Harris another read-through. "Faith of My Fathers" by John McCain, "The Audacity of Hope" by Barack Obama and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" by J.K. Rowling are three books I am at various points of progress on reading. Just downloaded "The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials" by James Dashner to my kindle.
Ruby is capable of great love. That's why I finished the book. There were points where strong activity happened that I couldn't justify in my brain. Why would the president let the secret service train their guns on his own son, whom they had been charged with protecting? Parents- wouldn't more of them go to their deaths for their kids rather than subjecting them to a concentration camp, which for many of the kids very literally is a death camp? It is a jumping off point for a series that is not without its flaws. And the writer was young, I think probably college aged! But it is a taste of a new literary universe, and I don't think Alexandra Bracken should be discouraged from further exploring this literary universe which she has so meticulously developed and grown. Just because the characters don't always make the right decisions... just because there is elation quickly followed by tragedy, doesn't mean I'm ready to give up. But I'm going to take plenty of break time before re-upping for book two.
But I will need something to fill the space between now and the next Suzanne Collins book. So I may find my way back sooner.
Three and 1/4 stars.
It is a Young Adult Dystopian novel about teenagers who due to IAAN, or Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration, either die on impact or develop supernatural abilities. Those who die are buried and mourned. Those who live present a grave threat to humanity.
But those who live are presented with a grave threat from humanity.
It was very hard for this book to be perfect, since it kind of forces the readers to take the side of the teenagers, even though many of the teens who develop the special abilities end up being blood-thirsty maniacs bent on mind control, electricity control, and making things and places start on fire.
But what's the alternative? Concentration camps. The government, led by the evil and nefarious President Gray, sees concentration camps as the solution to the problem.
Such it is that our protagonist, Ruby, is plucked from her happy home life at the first signs of IAAN, also called Everhart's Disease, and placed in Thurmond, a concentration camp that is located in her homestate of Virginia.
But Ruby is a good person. Maybe we can't trust all teenagers. But we can trust her.
There are several different types of special abilities; or more to the point, different categories. There are blue, green, yellow, orange, and red. The color that their eyes glow is indicative of what type of mutant ability the teens have acquired.
Ruby, being an orange, has the ability to read memories and control minds, through the power of suggestion. This is how she avoids undergoing a test in the hospital wing. She gets the man trying to read her eye color to put down the test, much like Obi-Wan Kenobe managed to persuade the guard to let him and Luke Skywalker through in Star Wars. But if she gets found out, discovered for who she is, and especially revealed for what she's done, she's dead.
So we are rooting for her to escape with Cate, a nurse who is a mole for the Children's League. But oh, Cate is an adult. And it seems as though we can't trust, really, any adult characters in this story. Another factor that makes me feel to some extent alienated from the narrative.
Even though Ruby reads in the minds of Cate and her boyfriend Rob that they have blood on their hands from some of the kids they've run tests on, we are depending on the Children's League as the Deus Ex Machina to get Ruby out of her god-forsaken concentration camp setting.
But this is only the climax to the first act. Once out, she realizes that she's really in it for herself. And she decides to head out on the run. The other orange with her, a creepy boy named Martin, seems ready to kill to earn his keep. Such is the future that Ruby would be faced if she were to side with the Children's League. She'd be conscripted to take out government officials, Psi Special forces, and skip-tracers. They're effectively terrorists. So she would have to kill or be killed.
Oh man, I just got very inside sports there with my references. Such is the case with any dystopian futuristic novel. There's a learning curve. And it took me about a year to read this book from the day I first cracked it to the day I finished, with most of that done between May and August.
Government officials under the jurisdiction of President Gray make sure that there are no teens roaming the streets. Pretty much, all children once they reach the age of ten develop the Everhart's Disease. So most all children who are lucky enough to still be above ground are stuck in concentration camps like Thurmond. The ones who aren't either were freed by the Children's League, and work for them, or they live in clans, groups, or communities off the grid in the wilderness.
Psi Special Forces are basically like the Peacekeepers in The Hunger Games. They guard the Concentration Camps. They follow the blinkers or chip readers that the kids have with them or on them. I think they're embedded in their skin? Again, kind of like The Hunger Games, when the tributes have tracers injected into their skin. But Ruby avoids having one of those things, because Cate helps her escape.
Then there are the Skip Tracers. Not to be confused with tracers, the Skip Tracers. They are mercenary arms for hire who drive the backroads in their ramshackle pick-up trucks, looking for kids who have escaped from the concentration camps, in the hopes of turning them over to Psi special forces for a huge bounty.
And such it is that she runs. Ruby's only hope is the little girl she finds inside the abandoned gas station, collecting food for the two friends she has. Ruby chases her all the way back to the black van.
This sets off the much more interesting second act.
She encounters some "Lost Boys," as it were.... and a Lost Girl. There's Liam, a fellow teenager suffering from IAAN. He broke out of Caledonia, a concentration camp in Ohio. There's Chubbs, nickname for Charles, who also broke out of Caledonia... and still grieves the loss of his friend, James Fields.... to the point of obsession with finding his father, and delivering a letter from James that was entrusted with him when they made their great escape. Then there's Zu, short for Suzume.... the girl that Ruby scares within an inch of her life. she's barely a pre-teen.... and has seen far more suffering than any person of her tender age should. Their prison break resulted in mass fatalities.
But there it is.... Ruby has joined up with Liam, Chubbs, and Zu, having outrun the Children's League at an abandoned gas station. They hit the road in their van, Black Betty, with hopes of making it to the East River. The East River, not necessarily a river, is as legend has it, the settlement where an alleged "Skip Kid" is staying. The Skip Kid is a legend of a kid who escapes from the clutches of the Concentration Camps. I'm not sure why Alexandra Bracken builds up one particular kid to have so much clout as an aforementioned Skip Kid, since there are other kids who succeeded in getting out of the camps. But apparently he used his special powers to do so.
I think a prevailing theme of The Darkest Minds is you can't really trust anybody. You can't trust the president. (That rings true, and this book was published before Trump took office.) When you can't trust youth to control their power and abilities, you have to lock them up. (Unfortunately, this rings true today too, since the president has moved to detain children for more than twenty days in the detention centers which are coming dangerously close to becoming concentration camps. America has got to regain its moral compass and vote otherwise in November of 2020, but I'll save that for another entry). You want to trust your parents, but they've drunk the kool-aid and are letting the government take their kids, because they need to be "treated" and "rehabilitated" at hospitals. You want to trust the Children's League, but when Ruby succeeds in accessing the memories of Rob, the boyfriend of Cate, she sees that he pulled a gun on a girl in a moment when she wasn't using her powers, and didn't hesitate to pull the trigger.
Liam, Chubbs, and Suzume seem like the last bastion of trust for Ruby. She really can't trust anyone else but them. They don't immediately take to her. Chubbs in particular is skeptical. He'd completely shut her out if he found out she were actually an "orange." She passes herself off as a "green," less of a dangerous young person. But she does help them interpret the numbers in a message to mean the frequency number for a radio station, and that radio station turns out to be giving hidden subliminal messages to the teenagers who have been lucky enough to escape. (Apparently as a green, she's supposed to be able to work with numbers, cryptography and the like). I think that Ruby kind of pulls a Frank W. Abagnale Junior (Just saw Catch Me if You Can The Musical) and passes herself off as a green, lying to them for what she thinks the numbers mean, but then somehow manages to effectively put the letter number cryptogram together to help find the radio station, which does in fact lead them to the East River Settlement.
Here, things get interesting. There's this guy who runs the settlement. I don't want to give away too much about him. He goes by Clancy. I remember that, because Clancy's is the brand of Pretzel Sticks we found at Aldi to have in our green room during Sister Act. Clancy can help Ruby develop her special abilities. But it gets creepy, because Clancy's obviously a little bit older than Ruby, who's a normal sixteen year old girl.
Also, she's already got strong feelings for Liam. And Liam's not without strong feelings for Ruby, that's obvious!!
What should Ruby do? Liam wants to make it on his own. He wants to take his chances away from the East River crowd. Zu wants to go to California. Chubbs is eager to get out and deliver the letter to Jack's family. Ruby wants to find her grandma. Maybe she'd like to reunite with her parents, but something happened to her parents' memory. We learned in a very sad flashback that Zu wound up in Thurmond after her own parents turned her in. They called the police on her when they didn't recognize her. She woke up on the morning of her tenth birthday, thinking she was going to get the chocolate chip pancakes that she traditionally gets on her birthday. Her parents had gotten in a huge fight the night before, resulting in the throwing of things, breaking of things, and destruction of their living room. The mom and dad could not disagree upon the best way to help treat Ruby's inevitable IAAN diagnosis. Ruby begs her parents to remember who she is when she comes down to the kitchen. They see her as a home invasion. Ruby's dad is more compassionate than the mom at that juncture, and takes her out to the garage to wait for a police officer. The mom has no memory of her whatsoever. If the Psi Special Forces hadn't beaten the police there, maybe the parents would have shown some compassion to the stranger and gotten her to a safe house. But she instead wound up in Thurmond.
And the fact that she thinks her special abilities accidentally erased the memories her parents had of her leads to her reluctance to seek them out first. But she has her own reasons to break out from the East River. Her grandma may remember her. And when Zu takes off, she wants to find her.
Leaving the East River group, though, means she may never fully finish the training she's started with Clancy, the power to harness her abilities.
At human touch, much like Rogue in X-Men, she can cause damage. At one point earlier in the story, we saw how she used power of suggestion and a little bit of telekinesis to cause a car accident when the four of them were pursued through the countryside of West Virginia by skip tracers and the Children's League. She causes a skip tracer car to go right off the road.
She's worried that just the tender touch of Liam will cause her to lose control of her abilities and do something to harm him.
Is this book inside sports? You bet it is. Did it take a long time to catch up with the terminology? Absolutely it did, and this is the first book. Huge learning curve. I'd start to root for a character, and no sooner learn that they had ulterior motives. I'd root against a villain, and then realize that these teenagers, unharnessed, could do a huge amount of collateral damage in addition to hurting the villains. (See X-Men: Dark Phoenix). I liked the book, ultimately, because even when Ruby ended up in a love triangle with two boys, and one of the boys was so very obviously wrong for her, the right boy never lost his faith in her, never blamed her, never wanted to give up on saving her. In other words, that particular boy was heavily reminiscent of Peeta to Ruby's Katniss.
Will Ruby ever fully develop and control her mind control and telekinetic powers? Will she be able to trust the community of kids at East River? Is the "Slip Kid" good or evil? And who will win out? Liam, who just wants to get out and have a high school life that he's missed coming of age in a concentration camp? Maybe find his brother, who also had to work for a period of time for the Children's League, and saw some of the horrible things that Liam did? He wanted Liam to not have to kill teachers, students, and public servants, so he helped Liam get out of that situation. Or will Clancy prevail, the mysterious orange with more than a little romantic interest in Ruby, who would spare nothing to develop his own abilities? And spare nobody if they dared attempt to leave the community to which they'd pledge allegiance? (East River is kind of to Thurmond what District 13 was to the Capitol.... an alternative to evil that turns out to be another catastrophe in the making.)
The Darkest Minds did evoke The Hunger Games in its better moments. Will I go on to read the second book, Never Fade? I kind of feel like I have to, now that Alexandra Bracken left us in a cliffhanger.
In the meantime, though, I am taking a break from dystopian and gravitating toward human interest and biographical stories. I am reading "The Chris Farley Show" by Tom Farley, Jr. and Tanner Colby. Planning to find "Unqualified" by Anna Faris, "Grateful American" by Gary Sinise, "Every Day is Extra" by John Kerry, and "Someday" By David Levithan. Want to give "Choose Your Own Autobiography" by Neil Patrick Harris another read-through. "Faith of My Fathers" by John McCain, "The Audacity of Hope" by Barack Obama and "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" by J.K. Rowling are three books I am at various points of progress on reading. Just downloaded "The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials" by James Dashner to my kindle.
Ruby is capable of great love. That's why I finished the book. There were points where strong activity happened that I couldn't justify in my brain. Why would the president let the secret service train their guns on his own son, whom they had been charged with protecting? Parents- wouldn't more of them go to their deaths for their kids rather than subjecting them to a concentration camp, which for many of the kids very literally is a death camp? It is a jumping off point for a series that is not without its flaws. And the writer was young, I think probably college aged! But it is a taste of a new literary universe, and I don't think Alexandra Bracken should be discouraged from further exploring this literary universe which she has so meticulously developed and grown. Just because the characters don't always make the right decisions... just because there is elation quickly followed by tragedy, doesn't mean I'm ready to give up. But I'm going to take plenty of break time before re-upping for book two.
But I will need something to fill the space between now and the next Suzanne Collins book. So I may find my way back sooner.
Three and 1/4 stars.