Reviewed by Rinn on
Me throughout most of this book?
Yeah. Where to begin? First of all, let’s address the fact that NOWHERE is it explained why Kitty’s society is like this. The people are ‘ranked’ on their seventeenth birthday, given a number from I to VI, with VII only applying to the President and his family. If you’re anything below a III, then it pretty much means you disappear from society in ~mysterious circumstances~. GEE I WONDER WHAT THEY COULD BE? Why does no-one question this?!
The only background information that we get for why this system is in place is because the economy crashed. Sorry, what? Did the people turn feral the moment Wall Street went down? How did everything get built back up? Why are the ranks the best solution? Why can people only have one child? Answers on a postcard, please.
Major issue #2: the ranking system is a big con and NO-ONE REALISES IT. Seriously. If you’re a higher ranking member of society, you’ll be able to access better facilities including healthcare and education. So if you’re raised in a Rank IV environment, you will receive a worse education than those raised in Rank V and VI, meaning you’re more likely to get stuck in that system, then repeat with your children, their children, etc. How has no-one in this society worked this out? That was my immediate thought as soon as I read about the rankings. Kitty is later told this is how it works and is all like ‘Oh yeah that explains it!’… really Kitty, really. No wonder you were marked a Rank III.
And major issue #3, the thing that SERIOUSLY pissed me off and made me want to slap some sense into Kitty?
She would rather become a prostitute to stay near her boyfriend than be given a safe job and be sent to another state.
I just… yeah. That should have set off the alarm bells really. At first I thought their relationship seemed okay, Benjy was someone Kitty had grown up with so it wasn’t insta-love, she wasn’t all despondent about the idea of them being different ranks and it seemed she was thinking more of Benjy’s feelings than their romance. And then she does a complete 180 and makes this ridiculous decision and I just immediately gave up on her as a character.
Oh, there were so many other reasons… Kitty’s virginity is being sold off after she makes her truly awesome decision of becoming a prostitute to keep her teen romance alive, and she is bought by the President. He needs her because she has the same eyes as his niece – who died a week before in a skiing accident. Apparently they can do all this ridiculous surgery to completely transform someone, but the eyes can’t be changed! Contacts? What are they? So yeah, Kitty is ‘bought’, smuggled out of the brothel and wakes up a week later completely transformed. And she really doesn’t seem that freaked out by the fact that these people have abducted her and utterly changed her appearance into that of Lila Hart, the President’s niece, without her consent. Cool.
AND THEN OH GOD THERE’S MORE.
Lila has a fiancee. A fiancee that Kitty now has to marry, as Lila. A fiancee that I can see her eventually falling in love with and then oh no LOVE TRIANGLE. Towards the end of the book she also has to do something really big in order to save her life and those of whom she loves, and she chickens out halfway – where is her sense of self-preservation?! It really frustrates me when people talk big about how they will protect their loved ones, but they can never go through with it. And one final thing – I am expecting the next book or somewhere in the series to reveal that Kitty’s parents were VIs or even VIIs and therefore she is ~special~. But I won’t know, because I won’t be reading book number two, no thank you.
Reading updates
- Started reading
- 16 February, 2015: Finished reading
- 16 February, 2015: Reviewed