The Scorpion Rules by Erin Bow

The Scorpion Rules (Prisoners of Peace, #1)

by Erin Bow

The world is at peace, said the Utterances. And really, if the odd princess has a hard day, is that too much to ask?

Greta is a duchess and crown princess—and a hostage to peace. This is how the game is played: if you want to rule, you must give one of your children as a hostage. Go to war and your hostage dies.

Greta will be free if she can survive until her eighteenth birthday. Until then she lives in the Precepture school with the daughters and sons of the world’s leaders. Like them, she is taught to obey the machines that control their lives. Like them, she is prepared to die with dignity, if she must. But everything changes when a new hostage arrives. Elián is a boy who refuses to play by the rules, a boy who defies everything Greta has ever been taught. And he opens Greta’s eyes to the brutality of the system they live under—and to her own power.

As Greta and Elián watch their nations tip closer to war, Greta becomes a target in a new kind of game. A game that will end up killing them both—unless she can find a way to break all the rules.

Reviewed by jeannamichel on

2 of 5 stars

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Set 400 years into the future, Greta has lived most of her life as a hostage or Child of Peace. A group of children, each from a separate territory of the world, are chosen as hostages to keep leaders from declaring war. Talis, master of the world, holds a strong belief of keeping it personal. If a leader is to declare war, the child from that territory is killed. When a new hostage takes Sydney’s place, Greta realizes that the system she was following so blindly is incredibly wrong. It is time to break some rules.

If writing a book had rules, Erin Bow broke them all. The action was superb, keeping readers on their toes. If those readers choose to stick around for that long, that is. The Scorpion Rules sounds fantastic. The premise is original; the idea of keeping royal children as hostages of peace is amazing. It could have been a tremendous page-turner but instead, it fell short.

With most science fiction and dystopian novels, authors need to take some time to describe their world—to build it up from scratch, or from our predicted world in the future. Bow does this to an extent but stops explaining her world, as if she got bored with it. There are robots (the correct Bow term is AI) but what do they look like? There are scorpions who are also robots, I think.

This book is teetering on the edge of being a joke and being serious. This is the book where Erin Bow translates goat bleats, the goats having even more ridiculous names then their conversations. This is the book where royal children farm and garden. This is book where holy utterances, a highly quotable piece of work by the master of the world, is written in overdramatic sass which is entertaining but also strange coming from a robot. This is the book where the protagonist pretends to be in The Bachelor, while having less emotions than that sass robot.

Talis, the master of the world (and he won’t let you forget it), is the only character worth mentioning—all the others fall incredibly flat. It doesn’t surprise me that Greta herself chose such an ending. I’m sure readers are meant to see a difference between first-page Greta and last-page Greta but I can’t find any. She is flat and a bit boring. It is still unclear as to why all the children choose her to be the leader of the pack; where does all this power come from? Is it because she’s from Canada? Talis, on the other hand, has spunk but is absent in most of the novel.

The Scorpion Rules could have been awesome—should have been awesome. Instead it’s a mashup between Animal Farm and The Bachelor with robots; for me, those ingredients don’t make for a good or even okay novel.

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 7 September, 2015: Finished reading
  • 7 September, 2015: Reviewed