Yello readers. I hadn't read today's book all the way through when I wrote my last blog post (and I was a little depressed when I wrote my last blog post), so you got no book review then. Now, though, I have the book read, but I'm not going to wait for November.
I present to you a YA/sci-fi novel that came out last summer:
Sanctuary by
Caryn Lix.
(I am considerate to post these links here, you know that? If you follow them, it could render my review redundant. If you're still reading, thank you. Have a cookie.)
Anyway, here's my half-minute summary of
Sanctuary: Kenzie is a junior guard on a prison spaceship for superpowered teenagers, and her mom is the commanding officer. If Kenzie's life went awry when she was captured by the inmates, you can only imagine how sideways things go when an unknown being invades the ship...
And here's my three-second summary of
Sanctuary: It's
X-Men meets
Alien.
Yet, in spite of that brutally blunt summary, I do recommend this book. I would read it again myself.
Let me begin by getting my petty complaints out of the way. To begin, Kenzie represents another (presumably) white-girl protagonist whose name begins with a hard "K" sound. Katniss, Cassie, Cia (OK, that last one is an "s" sound, but whatever), and now Kenzie. It gets hard to pick them out of a nominal lineup, and I have a hard enough time remembering names already.
Second, there were a few plot developments that I predicted would happen from anywhere between 20 and 200 pages before they actually occurred. If anyone reading this has read
Sanctuary themselves, they might understand why I shouted around the middle of the book, "So TALK to them already, Dr. Doolittle!"
Third, there is a near-end plot point that feels a little unnecessary--and poached from
Divergent. If you don't want spoilers, skip all of the nest paragraph. No peeking.
OK, just in case someone's trying to peek anyway, let's just say someone named M_____ gets killed in the climactic chapter. He/she was getting a beatdown from that mystery creature I alluded to earlier, but he/she was hastened on his way by a stray bullet as Kenzie tried to shoot said creature. It was an accident, but it's still a big deal; after all, Kenzie was a guard over the prisoners, so M_____'s death would sound suspicious. Heck, M_____ even had a significant other. The accident is kept secret, but it gnaws at Kenzie for the rest of the book. To me, that sounded too much like that protagonist from
Divergent who killed her friend's zombie-esqe boyfriend, carrying over into an awkward part of Book 2 (what's it called?
Insurgent or
Allegiant?). I think. I've only read the first book of
Divergent, and I've heard things get awkward in Book 2. In
Sanctuary, the event was traumatic but felt unnecessary--especially because the book was by no means done with trauma or death, and it dulled the payoff that the reader should have felt at the end of the book.
If the author is reading this, I should let you know that I can rant forever about the smallest things that bug me. Don't worry; even though I can bang on about those details forever (and I could never really get a clear picture in my head of that mystery creature), I did like the book.
In my
Dystopian Teen Novel Review Checklist that I haven't used in forever,
Sanctuary scores low, which is a good thing. Also, the characters--main
and side--have genuine complexity, which I've missed in YA books lately. Kenzie's mom is not a complete evil-corporation-brainwash-success-story, and the incarcerates are not 100 percent angels. You can see everyone pretty clearly, from their personality quirks to their special skills to their appearances (I will say, though, that you end up seeing the abs of Kenzie's love interest VERY clearly; I could never tell if he was wearing his shirt or not). Best of all, nobody felt token. Nobody felt thrown in to make a publisher's quota--there is even a good Catholic in there, which made me feel all happy inside. There were a good number of cutesy romances in there, but the characters never felt held together with duct tape. They were genuine complementary romances, to which I can only scream "Thank goodness!" Best of all, there were brief moments of actual
levity. Y'know, human beings' indomitable tendency to be ridiculous. Dear author,
thank you for leaving those moments in. I still want more of them, but that's because I'm probably the Joker's apprentice at my current stage of mental development.
The setting? Excellent. Ninety percent of
Sanctuary took place on the prison spaceship that shares the book's title. I loved the way that Kenzie's surroundings went from familiar to menacing through her changes as a person. The surroundings were descriptive, but not so much that it left no wiggle room for the imagination. I did keep superimposing mental snapshots of
System Shock 2 in my mental images, though. They were fitting, but the graphics quality wasn't great (and people who've played the original game will laugh at my joke there). The point is, even though it was the home of a part horror story, I wanted to hang out in
Sanctuary.
The story arc has more of an extended climax, not so much of an...um..."Dun dun DUUNNN!" *
tssshh!* climax. Does that make sense? I didn't think so. Basically, instead of one big crap bucket hitting the fan at once, it's more of a steady disgusting fire hose. Personally, I'm a little shaky on that technique--it tends to weaken the ending's overall impact, in my opinion--but I'll let it slide this time. It kinda works. The rest of the plot has believable character arcs, and thankfully Kenzie herself has the mental wherewithal to question whether or not she has Stockholm Syndrome. Excellent, even if it doesn't excuse her from a possible positive diagnosis.
Also, my occasional plot predictions aside,
Sanctuary had a good number of actual surprising plot twists. Yes!
In short,
Sanctuary is a good book. It still has things that annoy me a little, but I would accept a personal copy if one comes my way. I would put it alongside my other books on the shelf without fear of them being contaminated by association.
Sanctuary does pinch a lot of elements from
X-Men and
Alien, but it makes those elements its own special thing. It burgles but doesn't bungle, if you get my turn of phrase there. I think it could afford a slightly higher score on
Goodreads, too. Maybe not a perfect score, but a little higher.
And hey, there's a
sequel out...
