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I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley.
On paper, ‘Shard' seemed like a good option or me as a reader. After finishing several consecutive complex adult fantasy series, I was looking for a quicker, lighter read, so a short YA dystopian seemed to fit the bill. There's also the fact that I'm not a stickler for originality. Sure, I get tired of the same old cliches after seeing them a thousand times, especially if I wasn't crazy about them in the first place, but if a story built on the bones of old tropes has good characters or a refreshing twist, I will usually enjoy it.
Additionally, I'm old enough to remember 9/11, and to have a fairly good memory of what the world was like before and the ways in which it changed afterward: the fear, the paranoia, the xenophobia, and the things they were used to justify. The question What if it had just kept escalating? was something I immediately found chilling, and an interesting premise upon which to base a dystopian story. Unfortunately, it turned out to just feel like a pretext for a pretty standard-issue YA dystopian world, without the true implications being explored with much depth. (In particular, the book seemed to skip over the fact that Muslim and Middle Eastern communities, and other ethnic/religious groups commonly confused with them by uninformed outsiders, bore the brunt of the post-9/11 fear and xenophobia.)
On a surface level, the characters in this book were quite diverse, but I felt that the story would have benefited from a sensitivity reader. While I'm white, and therefore have zero firsthand understanding of what it's like to interact with law enforcement as a Black child, I felt that Kaia's history of growing up as a Black girl in foster care in a more authoritarian version of America than we live in today should have at least somewhat informed her thoughts and reactions when she was arrested in the airport, but didn't seem to at all. I even went back to reread that section to make sure I hadn't missed something, but there was nothing. I did a double-take when her skin color was first mentioned - and then I did another double-take at how it was mentioned. Comparing a Black girl's skin to “mocha or hot chocolate” feels like another thing a sensitivity reader might have picked up on.
There were some funny moments, the editing was generally good, and I liked that there were a number of different viewpoint characters, but this one just wasn't for me. Around the time the girl hate showed up - Kaia had unkind thoughts about the other girls pretty much right away, including the requisite ‘mean girl' stereotyping - I realized there was no way I was going to like it. This felt very much like a novel that might have come out in 2011, and even then I don't think I would have found it fresh or genuine enough to hold my attention.
