Specials

It’s been a while since I posted, so I know it’s lame to just post a book review, but I hope it’s better than nothing. I’ll try to post something more interesting soon.
I felt like this series was thematically confused. I enjoyed the series; it was a fun read. And I really appreciated that it was attempting to ask bigger questions than most YA fiction does. However, it seemed to lose track of its own questions. The ending (Tally’s Manifesto) seemed to imply that its most important questions were different than the questions it actually explored.

For example, Tally seems passionate about the environment and the idea that society cannot be allowed to “spread out” as it desires. Tally expressed this over and over throughout all three books, but the story never examined the issue. There was never an exploration of why this is bad. Tally always thought that it was bad, but maybe that was just part of her societal programming. Just because she doesn’t undo that particular programming does not mean it isn’t programming. Nothing in the story (that I can think of) supports Tally’s paranoia. She was horrified when the Smoke was spreading outside the city, but she learned to be okay with it.

There seemed to be many issues that were dealt with this way. So yeah, fun books, but a little disappointing.

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