Review: The Darkest Minds

The Darkest Minds
The Darkest Minds, Book 1

Author: Alexandra Bracken
Pages: 496
Publisher: Hyperion Book CH
Source: ARC from BEA

Description from Goodreads:
When Ruby woke up on her tenth birthday, something about her had changed. Something alarming enough to make her parents lock her in the garage and call the police. Something that gets her sent to Thurmond, a brutal government “rehabilitation camp.” She might have survived the mysterious disease that’s killed most of America’s children, but she and the others have emerged with something far worse: frightening abilities they cannot control.

Now sixteen, Ruby is one of the dangerous ones.

When the truth comes out, Ruby barely escapes Thurmond with her life. Now she’s on the run, desperate to find the one safe haven left for kids like her—East River. She joins a group of kids who escaped their own camp. Liam, their brave leader, is falling hard for Ruby. But no matter how much she aches for him, Ruby can’t risk getting close. Not after what happened to her parents.

When they arrive at East River, nothing is as it seems, least of all its mysterious leader. But there are other forces at work, people who will stop at nothing to use Ruby in their fight against the government. Ruby will be faced with a terrible choice, one that may mean giving up her only chance at a life worth living.

First Sentence: "When the White Noise went off, we were in the Garden, pulling weeds"

Review:

For whatever reason this book just did not work for me. All of my reviewer friends with similar taste enjoyed it a lot, like Great Imaginations, Cuddlebuggery, and Xpresso Reads. Perhaps I was not in the right mood, or maybe this falls under the category of books that mean that the readers most similar to me only agree with me on three out of four books.

This really should be a book that I love, and I'm not entirely sure where everything went wrong. I mean, it sounds so perfect for me: dystopian fiction about kids with powers. Obviously, I love dystopias, and I also will read anything I can get my hands on about people evolving powers ala X-Men. Some of the problem might have been my mood, but, whatever the case, this story fell entirely flat.

The writing, while not awful, did not stand out for me in any way. Within this book's pages, I saw several of those overused, annoying sentences, including one where the heroine doesn't realize she's not breathing and another where she hears a scream that she then figures out is hers. Of course, the fact that the font size, in the ARC at least, is so large exacerbates the childish feel to the writing. Take, for example, the very first sentence: the needless capitalization irks, as does the comma after "Garden." Again, it's certainly passable YA writing, but did not work for me at all.

What really kept me from engaging with this story is my lack of connection to Ruby. In a first person narrative, having a compelling, well-drawn MC is crucial, and Ruby is not that. She never really coalesced into a realistic person. At different points in the novel, she seems to be entirely different in terms of her personality. In the camp, for example, she allows her friend to be punished in her stead, unwilling or unable to leap to the friend's defense. Later on, she regularly joins the fray to protect friends, and is considered strong and trustworthy, ready to fight. While, yes, I can see that she might have been operating under different rules in the camp than on the run, I never got any sense of her going through a change. She doesn't evolve; she's just suddenly different, without any sort of "well, I'm free from camp now, so I can be me again!" and it makes her feel very uneven.

The other characters are better, and the story becomes much more readable when she joined up with Chubs, Zu, and Liam. Chubs and Liam are definitely my favorite parts of the book, particularly the book-obsessed Chubs. Then again, one of the books Chubs has is Watership Down, which Ruby read before entering the camp, and then feels the need to quote obsessively throughout the book, because apparently she still remembers exact lines. Sure. Are you getting the sense I didn't like Ruby by the way I sidetracked my discussion of the others to complain about her?

The plot moves in stereotypical dystopian directions. Insert dramatic chase here. Insert cookie cutter bad guys around every corner. Add false sense of safety here. Begin separating the friends. Throw in a surprise bad guy, but make it entirely obvious he's bad so the reader can indulge in some dramatic irony! Now, for increased drama, add a love triangle into the mix and bake at 350 degrees. Finally, remove plot from oven and cut slices out of the main character's heart. AND DONE.

A couple of times, I thought maybe Bracken had done something to catch me off guard, but those would turn out to be fake out twists, followed by the totally predictable things I was expecting all along. She writes using the Chekhov rule. If something gets mentioned more than once, it will be used before the book is finished. This rule helps, of course, but it was so heavy-handed that I knew precisely where the story was headed.

There's a lot of potentially good things in this story, and it wasn't terrible, though I know my ranting might make it seem that I hated it. It just bored me pretty much all the way through. For a book about kids with powers like telepathy and telekinesis, there sure is not too much done with the powers. Stupid kids, if you all just use your powers against the grown ups, this is all over! Also, if all of the kids either died from that disease or developed these powers, why has the government not developed a proactive plan? All they're doing is slowly killing off the remaining kids when they should be turning this to their advantage on the global scale. The reaction to the crisis does not seem believable.

Listen, ranting aside, lots of people have loved this book, and I urge you to check out those reviews I linked to before taking this book off of your to-read list. Sometimes I just do not agree with anyone, and this could be that time.

Rating: 2/5

Favorite Quote: "'Maybe nothing will ever change for us,' he said. 'But don't you want to be around just in case it does?'"