The Declaration (Declaration)

by Gemma Malley

Anna Covey is a 'surplus'. She should not have been born. In a society in which aging is no longer feared, and death is no longer an inevitability, children are an abomination. Like all surpluses, Anna is living in Grange Hall and learning how to make amends for the selfish act her parents committed in having her. She is quietly accepting of her fate until, one day, a new inmate arrives. Anna's life is thrown into chaos. But is she brave enough to believe this mysterious boy? This is a tense and utterly compelling story about a society behind a wall, and the way in which two young people take the chance of breaking free.

• ISBN10: 1599901196
• ISBN13: 9781599901190
• Publish Date: 2 October 2007 (first published 3 September 2007)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 3 June 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
• Imprint: Bloomsbury Childrens Books
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 320
• Language: English

Reviews

The Declaration has an extremely interesting concept. What if a person could take a pill that granted them long life? What would happen to the world? Are there any rules? Are there any consequences? And all of these questions are answered to create the backdrop for an extremely interesting story.

So what made me give this book a two-star rating?

For some reason, I always felt distant or detached from The Declaration. Maybe it was the long diary entry at the beginning of the story, Anna's boring life as a surplus or Anna being a character who I just couldn't connect with. I wasn't sucked into the story or glued to the pages of the book. I wasn't shocked, I didn't smile and I didn't care if the characters failed or succeeded. I felt nothing.

This book was a fast read with an extremely interesting concept, but the detachment or distance involved with The Declaration made me not enjoy it as much as I wanted to.

[Kelly]

2.5 Stars
The concept is brilliant, the elderly living forever and children are a drain on society, they cannot earn their keep and should be eradicated, when in reality, the roles can be argued that the reverse is true. People now forgo having children, either needing to decide at only sixteen years old whether or not to sign the Declaration. Sign, and you'll live forever, trading that of potential children in the process.

But the execution felt amiss. Anna's character was not only brainwashed, but utterly annoying. She will do anything to please, including berating those younger than her at Grange Hall. Her only rebellious thought is of that of a journal she keeps, hiding it within a nook in a bathroom. When Peter allows his capture to rescue her, he refuses to leave, defending Grange Hall, Mrs Pincent and that she wants nothing to do with her parents who were selfish for bringing her into the world. But when Peter's life is in danger, she then decides to flee, no more questions asked and she's willing to sacrifice her life that she staunchly defended, branding Peter a liar.

Actual young adults will enjoy the storyline, but as an adult, I was craving action and the revolution that it barely touched upon. Anna was just too indecisive, too eager to please and far too accepting of life without questioning, and her about face just left me deflated.

[Nessa Luna]

Read this review, and many more on my blog October Tune!

Lately, I have read so much first-person narrated stories, that anything else looks weird to me. When I started reading The Declaration, it was in first-person, but after a while it changed into third-person (she, he, etc), because ‘Surplus Anna’ was writing in a diary, which was something she wasn’t even allowed to do. Surplusses, or to put it in ‘our’ words: slaves, aren’t allowed to do anything, they’re basically not even allowed to be alive, but there they are.

Anna lives in Grange Hall, a place where a lot of Surplusses live, and where they are being trained to become slaves. They are taught how to cook, how to clean, how to wash clothes, they are taught how useless they are, how they should hate their parents for having them, etc, etc.

There were a couple of parts in the story that were being written from someone else’s point of view, at first it made me a bit confused, because it was so sudden in the middle of a chapter, that I thought it was still Anna ‘speaking’. After a while, I got used to it, though I would have liked some ‘warning’ (for example, a new chapter or something like that). I honestly don’t like it when the POV changes in the middle of a chapter. The book ended a bit too abruptly in my opinion, and a bit too predictable, I had wanted a bit more action at the end of the book, but hey, that’s me. I like action-stories.