Let's Try This Reviewing Thing: Forsaken, by Lisa M. Stasse

All right, I'm going to do my best to not make a complete idiot of myself on the Internet, but I'll probably fail since I decided to do start off with a Very Challenging Book.

That is, a book I actually like. I've heard that it's easier to hate something than like something on the Internet, but I don't usually finish books I don't like (this is something I'm going to have to work on, obviously), so I have to start with one I enjoyed. So I'm going to give out my opinion on Forsaken, by Lisa M. Stasse.

(For those of you who don't want to read the entire review, get a very condensed one-sentence opinion at the end in bold font. But that's kind of lame of you if you do. I'm just saying.)

I got this book about a week or three ago, and it was probably only for the cover alone. I mean, look at this thing:

This is a pretty eye-catching cover, even if I STILL can't figure out what it's supposed to represent or symbolize even after I've read the story. Then, of course, there's the summary, taken straight from the inside cover of the book (it's sold in hardback, which tells you immediately that it is a BOOK OF QUALITY):

"When the rest of the world has given up on you, who will you become?

Alenna Shawcross hasn't seen her parents since they were dragged out of her house by government soldiers of the UNA, a new nation formed from the remnants of Canada, the USA and Mexico. And now, as a sixteen-year-old orphan, she has failed a government personality test designed to diagnose subversive tendencies.

As punishment, Alenna is banished to the wheel, a mysterious island where all the kids who fail get sent. A place where the conditions are brutal, and a civil war rages between two very different tribes of teenagers.

So when Alenna meets Liam, a charismatic warrior who is planning to escape, she must find the strength to make a difficult decision: to either accept her new life on the wheel, or to embark on a journey that will uncover shocking secrets about the UNA--and her own identity as well." 

Oh, hi! It’s another Hunger Games! That was my first thought at least—it had a real Hunger Games feel to it, at least to me. The dystopian world, totalitarian government, kids killing other kids in an effort to survive, shoehorned-in romance…that’s pretty much become its own little sub-genre, right along with teeny-bopper vampire romances. Now, I was a huge fan of The Hunger Games, and I’m someone who enjoys old familiar storylines, so this was a definite appeal to me.

It’s not really similar to The Hunger Games besides those few bare facts, but this still was an old familiar storyline, at its base—a person is thrown into a new and dangerous environment, and has to learn new skills/find a way out to survive. The totalitarian government and dystopian society is more like a backdrop, at least in this book—and it’s not much of a spoiler to say that there will definitely be at least one sequel.

Of course, what makes any book stand out from the rest of its genre is the details—the characters, the twists, the small points in the plot that make it different from the next sci-fi adventure dystopian on the shelf. And this one does have its unique qualities.

The dystopian society itself doesn’t seem to have anything that makes it all that special, but then it wasn’t really dwelled on that long. All I really got from it was that it was the USA, Canada, and Mexico in one big package, it was ruled by a “benevolent” dictator, and all the naughty kids who were supposed to grow up to be sociopaths and serial killers got sent to a nasty island to kill each other without bothering the rest of the nation. 

But the island. The island was pretty freaking amazing, for something that could kill you. Called The Wheel by the kids living there, it was divided into six different color-coded sectors—four are controlled by a cult-like tribe who drug themselves up and worship a mysterious “Monk,” one sector—the blue sector, where the main character Allena is dropped off—is controlled by the rivaling tribe just trying to survive, and one—the gray sector—that is blocked off, very hard to get into, and might possibly have a way to get off the island. If you go into different sectors than the one you were placed in by the government, things called feelers can come and drag you away to who-knows-where.

The main conflict in the book is that the blue sector’s fight against the Monk’s cult is a losing one, and Alenna ends up stuck on the island right around the time they realize this and decide to really try to get off the island any way possible. Their best bet is the mysterious gray sector, where temperatures are a good fifty degrees colder than the rest of the tropical island or worse, and where no one has gone very far into without returning back. Along the way through the various deathly obstacles the group must overcome, Alenna finds out that her parents had once been on the island and might have left clues as to what happened to them all those years ago.

While some of the secrets the reader finds out in this book can be seen from a mile away (parents went missing ages ago and protagonist thinks they’re dead? I wonder who will show up at some point in the story?), most honestly surprised me as they were revealed. Where do the feelers take kids? What is the point of the colored sectors? What does the gray sector hold? All of these questions are at least partially answered in Forsaken, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that my guesses to most of these answers were wrong.

In my opinion, the best part of the book was the main character, though. She was such an enjoyable character to read about, mostly because she didn’t do the obnoxiously stupid things that make you want to throw the book across the room. Alenna's not a super badass from the beginning of the book--she's just a kid that's trying to stay under the radar. She's not a revolutionary, and doesn't even think her government is that bad to begin with considering it kept people safe, at least. But when she ends up on the island--something she was so sure would never happen because she's the most normal person she knows!--she does her best to adapt to her harsh new reality, instead of sitting around and letting all the Strong People take care of her like some characters we see thrown into new and dangerous worlds.

She also doesn't magically become an amazing fighter or hunter either. The book actually devotes one or two chapters to her learning how to fight and not be dead weight. I definitely give Ms. Stasse props for actually writing out how Alenna learns the ropes instead of skipping over all that detail without making it incredibly boring, mostly because it's also used to build on her relationships with other people, including the love interest Liam (who is of course an excellent fighter and helps teach her).

And this might be a turn-off for people who really like a lot of romance mixed in with their apocalyptic death matches, but the romance in the story is ridiculously low-key. In fact, the love interest isn't even present for a good three quarters of the book! Alenna literally meets him, they have their soul-bonding, love-at-first-sight moment, he teaches her how to fight, and then he's gone for reasons that will spoil the book if I said them.

But that's just another reason why I like Alenna so much. She does go goo-goo eyed for some random hot dude who can fight, but she doesn't let that overpower her entire life--she pretty much does her best to keep it on the back burner (which works as well as can be expected, considering she's a teenager with hormones and there needs to be the obligatory romance), and focuses on her friendship with another side character as well as the important things like, you know, staying alive. It's quite admirable, really.

But yeah, watch me ramble. Overall, I felt this was an enjoyable book. It's hardly a masterpiece, but it's a fun read with an interesting world and some cool twists--a good book for what it is. I'd give it a seven out of ten, and maybe read the sequel.

Tl;dr: This was a fun and decent book. It had an interesting plot and world, and anyone who's looking for something fun to read will like this.

Till next time, I bid you adieu.