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Saturday, November 29, 2014

Review: The 100 by Kass Morgan

"In the future, humans live in city-like spaceships orbiting far above Earth's toxic atmosphere. No one knows when, or even if, the long-abandoned planet will be habitable again. But faced with dwindling resources and a growing populace, government leaders know they must reclaim their homeland... before it's too late. 
Now, one hundred juvenile delinquents are being sent on a high-stakes mission to recolonize Earth. After a brutal crash landing, the teens arrive on a savagely beautiful planet they've only seen from space. Confronting the dangers of this rugged new world, they struggle to form a tentative community. But they're haunted by their past and uncertain about the future. To survive, they must learn to trust - and even love - again."
Title: The 100
Author: Kass Morgan
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Length: 323 pages
Release Date: September 3, 2013 



I really wanted to like this book. I'd heard pretty good things about it, and though I've never seen the TV show it inspired, I'd also heard that it was actually kind of great (for the CW, at least). The plot looked interesting, if a bit campy, and I thought it had the potential to be something really good. I suppose you could say I had really high hopes for it; unrealistically high.

It's not that The 100 was bad, per se, it just didn't live up to my hopes. That's probably partly my fault for getting them up so high in the first place, to be honest. Still, the book was okay. Not good, not great, but not terrible either. It felt like an outline of something that could have been so much better than it actually was. The biggest reason I can think of for this was the sheer number of characters. Between her four narrators (Clarke, Bellamy, Wells, and Glass) and considerably short length (323 pages), there were too many voices for Ms. Morgan to work with in not nearly enough time. I do understand that this book is the first in a series and therefore not everything has to be perfectly developed and resolved, but it still felt sorely lacking in depth. The four voices sounded fairly similar, and their respective storylines were alternately repetitive of one another and completely disjointed and unrelated. Glass, one of the main narrators, doesn't go down to Earth with the others, and while I did enjoy having her perspective of life on the ship, she felt like an unrelated afterthought to the love triangles and survival stories going on down below. To be fair, Glass was one of my two favorite voices, and I thought she was one of the most surprisingly fleshed out of the bunch, but I almost wished she had her own book, rather than being sidelined the way she was.

That was my biggest problem with The 100, I think. There was too much going on but not enough development, and the result was a flat, half-drawn sketch of something promising. None of the events actually really sunk in as important to me; they all felt quite underwhelming and almost nonexistent. I can quite honestly say that it feels like nothing happened in the book at all, despite there being quite a bit of action. However, what action there was felt a bit gimmicky and forced. Look back to the premise of the book: a hundred juvenile delinquents travel to Earth, which may or may not be safe for human habitation (Because why? No one cares about teenagers? They're the best ones for the job? [actually, I think it's because they killed all the adult convicts, but that's besides the point]), and are left to their own devices. What happens is pretty much what you would expect, a sort of post-apocalyptic reality TV show. It is cool, but it's thin. It's faddish. It's just not quite substantial enough to hold its own the way I hoped it would.

That said, it's not all bad. The 100 actually has quite a bit of good in it, too. When given the opportunity, Ms. Morgan shows some rather unique world-building, especially in relation to the spaceship on which the humans now live. She's worked out a complex set of laws, customs, and social norms, and it really does feel like a living, breathing society. There were a few times that had me sit back and think "We could actually very well end up like this, at the rate we're going." Her backstory, too, was great. It was muddled down underneath love triangles and teenage angst, but it was there, and it was tragic and kind of beautiful. It was that driving force, the story of how humanity has ended up where it has, that kept me reading. I didn't care about whether or not Clarke ended up with Bellamy or Wells (for the record, I'm pro-Wells), I cared about the survival of the human race. It's that survival story that will keep me reading on through the series, albeit with significantly lowered expectations.

I was provided with a copy by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. (Thank you!)

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