Carve the Mark

Well, that's going to leave a mark. When it comes to the YA genre, Roth is a recent newcomer. She was made famous by her Divergent Trilogy, and now she wants to continue her success with a new scifi book. This one, however, is different, with it being set in the vastness of SPAAAAAAACE. It has two warring factions of people, and a system of science that would give people X-men like powers. What's not to like? Well, actually, quiet a lot.

I had mixed feelings when it came to Veronica Roth's earlier series. Her Divergent Trilogy was one that I had some fun with, but it began to grade on me fast. With regards to Divergent, the book was fun and exciting when Tris tried to battle other people, but it then switched to the bigger world, which just drew attention to the larger problems that made me frustrated at the lack of world building. Insurgent was a book that tried to expand on Tris and Four's relationship, while introducing me to new characters, but there was so little too them that I stopped caring by the end of the book. In the Divergent Trillogy, it felt like Roth had the barest of ideas for Tris and Four, but did not think the world through, leading to major question about not only the world building, but also the constructs within the dystopia itself. With Carve the Mark, I hoped that Rith would take what she had learned from her previous series and make a better science fiction novel that was going to be set in the vastness of SPAAAAAAAACCCE!

And yet, Roth manages to create a world that is more confusing than her last. With this world, a force called the Current, exists floating in space and acts almost like a magic Santa Clause, in that if you are naughty or nice, the current with bestow upon you an X-men like gift that can either be a bane or a blessing. This would suggest that the Current is somehow a cognizant being, who, again like Santa, is able to see what kinds of gifts people deserve. But, like many things Roth writes, we only know enough about it so that it can serve as a catalyst for the plot. We never get satisfactory answers to basic questions. Here are a few I had while reading the book:

Why does the current bestow Cyra's gift on her at 9 years old, when everyone else gets it as a teenager?

Why does everyone get their gift at about 15/16 and not later?

How does the current know who to give what gift?

What are these current blades made out of, and why don't they use a gun or blaster of some kind?

Many of these questions are never satisfactorily answered. They are only used as plot devices, and little more. This leaves the ideas of the current lacking in substance. Yet the world building Roth does allow is often confusing and poorly developed, or, at least, it is written that way. Often we will get explanations of the different cultures and factions and family history, but it is so poorly written into a scene that it not only can be hard to follow, but it slows the book down to a crawl. In one sentence, Roth is describing how a main character is a religious ceremony, and the next she is describing the traditions of a family from a long time ago, and then back to the scene again. This creates confusion and bogs down the prose, to the point where I continued reading, but without much caring. It feels like there was some good thoughts here, I think, but they needed a far better editor to make more coherent sense.

This lack of substance continues when it comes to the general setting. It is supposed to be set in SPAAAAAAACE but it isn't. Or, at least, it does not feel like it. Many of the staples of science fiction, such as scanners, spaceship corridors, and droids, are noticeably absent. These are traded for normal sounding words and descriptions of rooms and objects that have a distinctly, un sci fi feel to them. Times where a character should be using a scanner to open a door or a droid as a guard, in Roth's language, means they are opening locks with keys, and calling human guards for a security breach. When one would use an app to count the kills one has made of an enemy, here Roth has the characters mark it on their skin. Now, I know that it could be a case for this being set in the near future, where tech hasn't advanced that much, but when the marketing team is comparing it to Star Wars, certain expectations have to be met. I have read, and as of this review am currently reading, actual Star Wars books, and they feel far more scientifically developed than this novel ever will. When compared to books like Bloodline by Claudia Gray, this book would be a laughing stock of the Scifi community.

This book is not only short on the elements of the scifi genre that Rot should have had, but it relies on tropes that Roth should know by now to stay away from. This includes the main heroine who thinks that she isn't pretty. Her mom, on the other hand, is far prettier than she will ever be. Yet, we have boys who will be extremely attracted to the main heroine, regardless. Seriously, I want to know, is this idea of teenage girls thinking that their mom is prettier than them a thing? Like, is this something they go through? Then there is another, even worse YA trope, the boy and girl who hate each other who eventually fall in love. There was no tension with how Akos and Cyra fall in love because it is all down to a formula. They at first don't like each other (why, I'm not really sure), then only to change to grudging acceptance, then, finally, blossom into love. As a result, I had no emotions towards this run of the mill romance that I am supposed to believe.

Of course, part of this could be because the characters are so forgettable to begin with. The only thing I remember about Cyra is that she has the ability to give out physical pain...and that is it. Other than that, she is almost a carbon copy of Tris, from Roth's Divergent series. Which is to say, she is so bland, she could almost be a stand in for the reader. Akos was not any better. He has the ability to take away Current gifts, and he wants to look after his younger sibling (hey, I found another YA Trope!) and, that is about it. He is just as underdeveloped as Cyra. But by far, the biggest crime is Cyra's brother and the main villain, Ryzek. Now, I was expecting a villain that was a lot more calculating than Roth's previous antagonists, and I didn't get that. Instead, I got a guy who has little motivation for being evil other than he wants to rule over the Shotet people with an iron fist. Why is he evil? You may ask, well...we don't really know. We get some hints at an abusive father, but what a father can do that would make a son go this dark is really a mystery to me. It feels like the level of violence, or even hinted violence, is not justified for the explanation we have. And I don't mean that in a good way, like how in the next book, some revelation will come along that will explain away all Ryzek's behavior. More like, Roth didn't know what to write, so she just left it to daddy issues. This was by far one of the weakest parts of the book, because without a convincing villain, there is no incentive for me to care about the people who are fighting him aka our main characters Cyra and Akos.

All of this amounts to a book that has me both angered and disappointed. I say angered, because, as I said before, this book was labeled for fans of Star Wars, but this book pales in comparison to that film series/novel series of a sci fi world. Much of the elements that are ripped from the Star Wars universe feel like they were done so only because Roth couldn't make up something better. The characters felt like they were ripped right from the YA hacks guide to writing, with little of the originality, or, more importantly, the feeling like I hadn't seen these characters before. While it is true that the Star Wars characters can be defined as archetypes that people may have seen before, we enjoyed them because their dialogue, mannerisms, and the universe they were set in made it feel new again. Here, Roth has taken characters that we have seen before, and done little new to them. She has gone the safe route, not daring to try anything new, with the exception of having it ‘set' in SPAAAA- you get the idea.

That is also what disappoints me. When it came to Divergent, I think many things there that I didn't like I gave a pass on because this was Roth's first ever book series. She was still writing and honing her craft. Now, with Carve the Mark, I had hoped that she would find a way to play with her strengths, and mitigate her weaknesses through careful planning. She has an excellent strength in terms of writing fight scenes, and she can work well with the hero's journey, as the reader watches a character go on some sort of quest. She also had problems with her world building. It was seriously suspect the more the reader thought about it, and she didn't seem to have a plan to resolve the series by later books. With Carve the Mark, I was hoping, even after many negative reviews came out, that she had taken this chance to improve her writing. Instead she has done characters we have seen before, made a world that is more complex, and more confusing than her last one, and borrowed elements from other scifi franchises with little originality. This make what could have been a potentially interesting premise quickly dwindle into a mediocre book that managed to make it onto the New York Times bestseller list only because of her name, and the controversy surrounding the release. (Don't worry, I won't get into that. This review has gone long enough).

In then end, this book went, unfortunately, as well as I was expecting it to go. I didn't think it was going to go well, but that doesn't mean it couldn't have changed my mind. In fact, I like a book even more when it can win me over. Regardless, on it's surface, Roth may have seemed like she was trying to make something new for the YA genre, but, if you take a close look, it is more of the same. Let's hope all these bad MARKS, and negative press provide a wake up call that we want some effort put into her next book. I'm giving it a one out of five.