First, a confession.
I am as done with YA dystopias that involve people being born in or assigned to zones or regions as I was once done with vampires. Babu is coming in on the tail end of a trend and may well suffer for it.
Because, The Initiation is actually pretty dang good. It deals with the twin ideas that late stage capitalism is awful...but communism doesn't work either. Which, I admit, I rather agree with.
But I'm looking for the book which subverts the YA dystopia thing. I'm reminded of a book I sadly lost my copy of years ago, and which I can remember neither the title nor the author of, which turned the entire idea in this book on its head. The resonances were so strong I kept hoping against hope it was a subversion, but no, it seems to be another Divergent ripoff. It might well be better than Divergent, because it doesn't try to go on and on about ableism. But...it doesn't bring anything new to an already-saturated sub genre. A few years ago, I would have really loved this book. Oh, and yes, there's a love triangle. Well, love quadrangle, because the question is which of the two guys is going to end up with which of the two girls. But sigh.
(And now I'm going crazy trying to remember the other book. It was a lost colony ruled by the scholars, and the MC has enough and tries to fight them. It turns out the scholars are really the good guys and recruit...the people with the balls to fight them. And it's from, oh man, decades ago. I think I got my copy in the 1980s).
So, what I'd actually say about The Initiation is this. If you love YA dystopias set after the apocalypse that deal with social inequality and caste systems and come with love triangles and can't get enough of them, read it. You'll love it.
If you're done with the entire thing...then you probably want to skip it. Which makes me feel quite sorry for the writer.
Copy received in the World Fantasy book bag. For the curious, I have three left.
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