The Testing by Joelle Charbonneau [DNF review]

TL;DR Generic Dystopian YA Book

TBR #326, added Apr 7, 2013

library ebook hold placed 9/25, #2 in queue; received 9/28 #1

I'm going to admit, after the first few pages I was expecting to DNF this.

The narration at the beginning is just so dull. It's like The Hunger Games or Twilight was for me; it wasn't interesting or compelling at all, and the lack of personality in the first-person narration was killing me.

Cia in general wasn't an interesting main character to me. It didn't feel like she had any real personality -- like the seemingly-utopian setup of her world had just leeched that out of her. Or never let it develop in the first place. At the point that I stopped reading, she still was too bland for me to care about. The rest of the characters all felt the same way.

I made it through at least the first cull in the Tests before I stopped reading. I procrastinated so much on reading The Testing because of the dull narration, and it got to the point where my claim to the library book was about to expire. I decided to let it expire and focus on other books instead of force myself to get further in.

There was no explanation or even any hint to why the testing was so brutal to the kids or so exclusive. At least The Hunger Games used the concept of the Games as a means of complacency. It's hard for me to believe that their world would restrict higher education so much when they obviously need people good with STEM to recover from whatever ecological disaster they had. The disaster is never explained, either, or why people are split up into colonies that are awfully like the districts of Panem.

I initially marked this as 'maybe later' on Goodreads when my copy expired, but in writing this review, I realized I have no interest in finishing this book or the rest of the series. (The Goodreads descriptions of the following books don't sound like they'd be worth the hassle.)

TL;DR The first 20% or so of the book felt like a generic version of The Hunger Games trend and didn't have anything spectacularly unique about it that made it worth reading.