kateslatealways

Great premise, dreadful writing.

It's almost all telling -- no showing. Anna's situation should be heartbreaking, but the heavy-handed writing had my eyes rolling instead. If the first half weren't so bloated, I'd say it was a hastily scribbled first draft as opposed to the published award nominee it is.

The characters are flat. Only Anna goes through any kind of character development, and it's small, sudden and unbelievable. Peter is the good-natured hero who can do nothing morally wrong. The "villains" are weak caricatures. The back story of the woman running the Surplus institution Anna lives in should be the kind of thing that, in supplement to the story of our protagonist, breaks our hearts and makes us want to demand change for such an unfair world. Instead it's danced around, intentionally vague, until it's suddenly info-dumped on us much too late.

As I said above, great premise. But what a weak plot. Almost nothing happens for most of the book and when things start moving the plot relies heavily on chance and coincidence instead of a logical chain of events.

I'm not going to check out the rest of this series, especially since in the five years between The Declaration and The Killables, the author's writing doesn't seem to have improved at all.