The Selection by Kiera Cass

TL;DR "dystopian" The Bachelor

(finished 5/4/15)

I'm gonna admit, I looked into the Goodreads reviews when I just started reading this. Like I've said before, not the best idea. (I think I did that with the first Lux series book. Something like that.) I am not going to deny it's possible I was influenced by all the negative reviews. Personally, I find a lot of negative reviews fun to read because there's a lot of thought in them. People will mention why the things that drove them crazy did so. Good reviews just don't give the same adrenaline rush.

Speaking of the adrenaline rush: I mainly finished The Selection because of how fun it was to sticky-note the book. I went through a ton of sticky notes. I did not hold back on the sarcasm.

I went through 50 sticky notes. I ended up having to buy another pack from Staples after I was done. 

I got frustrated with the narration almost immediately. It sounded like my first-draft scenes where I just got the ideas down instead of focusing on diction or descriptions or anything even remotely interesting to read about. And this is the final copy of the book! I know I still have a long road of improvement with showing and not telling, but at least I do some showing. This has, like, next to none. After a while I kind of got used to it, but it was pretty weak overall. (It made me feel a little better about my own writing, though, so I have to give it that.)

I also don't think the characters were characterized consistently at all. I have a couple different points in the book where I marked that I thought they were acting out of character to fuel the plot. All the girls other than America seemed pretty consistently characterized, but they felt pretty flat as it was. I didn't really have any investment in anyone.

Like everyone else has said on Goodreads, the worldbuilding's pretty weak, but it wasn't make-or-break for me. I mean, the focus is on stuff inside the palace, so that's really all I cared about. The palace itself seemed fairly well-established in my mind. I can't even tell how big Illea is supposed to be.

Those are the biggest things I had on my mind to talk about. Now the more fun stuff!

My friend pointed out The Selection at the library and said it was her "guilty pleasure", and now that I've finished it, I can kind of see why. A little. I did enjoy reading it to make sarcastic comments on my sticky notes. It isn't bad, and I honestly can't really compare it to the Lux series. I just think it's weak; it could definitely have gone through a few more rounds of revisions to become a lot stronger. However, with what I got from The Selection, I think it's a pretty solid two-star. I'd rate it a three if I liked the book a little more, but I think a three also would imply that I liked the book more than I did, which is why I left it as a two.

Aside from my sarcastic sticky notes, The Selection was good at keeping me just interested enough to keep reading. I started the book on Saturday night and was done within an hour of getting home on Monday, and I hadn't taken it into school. I'd actually read the book instead of goofing off on the internet, which I think is a pretty compelling point in and of itself.

That said, I'm almost entirely sure that The Elite is just going to be 300 pages of love V melodrama. I'm not looking forward to that. I'll probably still give it a chance out of curiosity, but I'm not expecting that I'll like it.

So I went through and typed up all the sticky notes I made. You can see them all here in a Google Spreadsheet. I tried to keep the excerpts from the book as short as possible to avoid possible copyright infringement, but I have them marked with the page numbers from the paperback version and a little bit of context as well. There are spoilers in the spreadsheet!! Keep that in mind! It has a lot more in-depth analysis of The Selection than this review, but I didn't censor it at all for spoilers.

TL;DR I didn't like it but it was interesting enough to finish and I can kind of see why it would be a guilty pleasure, though it definitely isn't one for me.