Dove Arising (Dove Chronicles, #1)

by Karen Bao

[nannah]

DNF @ 38% -- updated review below!

Ahhh, I wish I could love this! I didn't know anything about this when I picked it up at the library other than it was bursting with diverse characters.

Unfortunately, that's all I can say I liked about this. That, and I guess it's really admirable that Karen Bao wrote this as a teen! Lots of talent for someone that age. But I think there should've been more time spent on drafts for Dove Arising before it got published. The pacing is off, often super slow, and the plot structure isn't very organized.

There's also some annoyingly strong resemblance to other popular book series, like Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games and Veronica Roth's Divergent. Annoying because there's a love triangle in which the best friend is left at home and the other love interest is met at some dangerous place where fighting is involved. The best friend's love is (of course) one-sided.

Where I stopped, the protagonist was still training in this dangerous fighting place (Militia) on the moon. The book seemed less focused on the actual plot (the protagonist, Phaet, is forced to join the Militia early to keep her family out of the disease-ridden slums of Shelter), and more about the drama of her Milita life. Including the sparks between her and this new love interest, which I just ... I'm done with. Especially since everyone else in Militia keep talking about how young Phaet is! How old is everyone else then? I'm sideyeing this new love interest hard, and I really don't want to read another 68% of love-triangle drama.

So, I'm sorry, Dove Arising.

--

UPDATED REVIEW

If you loved The Hunger Games and Divergent, you’d probably love the first 3/4ths of Dove Arising, especially. Unfortunately, that means this book is not for me.

Content warnings:
- not truly traumatizing, but a heavy reliance on gender stereotypes and norms, like “female” hair must be tied back while working; “even a ponytail doesn’t make him look effeminate;” “hair as short as a man’s;” “fights between girls are skittish, those between boys, ferocious;” “It’ll remind me in the future that a girl had a quicker wrist than I did,” etc.
- an overwhelming air of sexism
- fatphobia
- eugenics (just hinted at: with mindsets of characters involving the dialogue of someone wanting to “rid the Earth of uneducated filth” . I believe this is intentional, however.)
- ableism

Representation:
- the main character and her family are Chinese
- one of the MC’s friends are Chinese as well, and another is Black and biracial

Phaet Theta lives on the moon among a whole colony of scientific elite who left Earth and its climate disasters and its unwillingness to listen to reason about three generations ago to pursue scientific thought. Since her father died when she was six, Phaet has chosen to let her best friend speak for her and lives a relatively quiet life -- until her mother is arrested for allegedly writing something treasonous. To support her siblings and bail her mother out of prison, Phaet has to join the Militia three years early and aim for the first ranking to get a high-paying job. It’s in the Militia where she learns to speak for herself. And where she learns secrets about life on the moon that turn her orderly world into chaos.

So here in Dove Arising we have some of your standard YA dystopian tropes including a controlling government banning things that seem a bit ridiculous (like religion … how do you successfully ban religion in a matter of three generations … ?), a love triangle in which one of the men is the MC’s long-time best friend and the other is seemingly a much cooler guy she meets while in Dauntless (er, the Militia), and the MC having skills way beyond what should be physically possible. I’m not trying to be cruel, but it was a struggle to get through the first 3/4ths of the book, and I only got through it to fulfill one of my reading challenges.

The main character is one of the biggest reasons I struggled with this story. Phaet is very difficult to like, acting like a jerk to all of the people who love her and dissecting their every action so she can judge them. She also constantly compares herself to everyone around her in a way that shows how unique and great she is in comparison, like how most trainees didn’t read the manual but SHE did; some do this or that embarrassing thing but SHE does neither, etc. She’s also written as if maybe … the author wanted her to be autistic? But if so, it’s pretty bad representation. Phaet is described as being “selectively mute” by another character, but simply choosing not to speak isn’t actually what being selectively mute means (being unable to speak in certain situations because of anxiety).

Phaet also analyzes everything and everyone around her, which makes her sound like a robot and the prose sound as if the author couldn’t put the thesaurus down: Phaet refers to everyone as a “female” or “male;” instead of someone speaking it’s “using his vocal chords;” when Phaet doesn’t understand someone flirting it’s “How could anyone laugh so much at a time? His anxiety must be causing him to overcompensate with geniality;” and the worst: in response to “Do you like him?” it’s “When did she start emphasizing random syllables with assertive inflections in her voice?” Phaet doesn’t seem to understand what facial expressions or gestures mean, but that makes even less sense when she communicates through such gestures herself, like, “I question him with my eyebrows: are you coming?” I know this isn’t the author’s writing style, because at one point we see an example of someone’s writing within the novel, and it’s very lovely! The author can actually write very well; I just wish I saw it more!

There’s also the fatphobia and the ableism that’s everywhere in the text. Body sizes are mentioned and judged nearly every page! There’s a stocky boy in the Militia (who also happens to be one of the villains, unfortunately), and every time he appears he’s called awful, fatphobic things, including a “landmass.” The ableism is more casual, but equally as hurtful. The only disabled characters are people in Shelter, where the poorest citizens go to live and die in disease and squalor. At one point when Phaet is being attacked, there’s also this actual line: “If she manages to take off a limb, I’ll be unable to pay for a reattachment operation or a prosthetic. I’ll become a cr*pple, leeching off of society.”

As a disabled person, that hurts like a physical blow. I can’t imagine how disabled young adults reading this would feel.

I will try not to complain about every single thing I didn’t like about this book, because it wasn’t all bad! The last 1/4th of the book was very engaging! The climax involving the trial of Phaet’s mother was very emotional and held my attention so much I stayed up a little to finish it. And I adored the dynamics between Phaet's family, and I adored Phaet's mother in particular. It's unfortunately not enough to make me want to read the sequels, but I might pick up Karen Bao's next book.