The Declaration by Gemma Malley

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.

Reviewed by Nessa Luna on

3 of 5 stars

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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.

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Reading updates

  • Started reading
  • 16 July, 2013: Finished reading
  • 16 July, 2013: Reviewed