Author: JC Andrijeski
Year of publication: 2011 (Netgalley says 2014)
Summary: Jet is a 19-year-old skag, one of the humans still living free on Earth following an invasion of creatures called the Nirreth. Squatting in the ruins of Vancouver, Canada, Jet and her family eke out an existence underground, hiding from the culler ships. No one knows where the ships take the people they grab, but they never return. When a culler finds Jet, she may discover the truth the hard way.
Review: **Copy kindly provided by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review**
The Culling presented as an exciting, diverse, new dystopian series with a kick-ass heroine who wields a sword. Unfortunately, in reality The Culling was anything but.
The prose was clunky and repetitive (the amount of times someone hardened their jaw, chuckled, or folded their arms, especially in the same scene, was super annoying) and it also contradicted itself time and time again. There is no real flow to the story - any time we start getting somewhere another info dump is forced upon us, instead of being weaved into the story. The author also spends far too much time telling, rather than showing, and they use broad descriptors such as; Japanese-style, Indian, and Native American, instead of anything with actual depth.
Another fault is with the characters - the main character, Jet, specifically. Jet has lived as a skag all her life, is supposed to know the rules, and at the beginning of the story she is presented as having good knowledge of the Nirreth and being street smart and savvy. Quickly, the reader finds out that this is a load of crock as Jet is kind of dumb, sacrificing her safety for a bit of alone time. She also seems to forget everything she is supposed to know about the Nirreth until whoops, it's too late. To add to insult, Anaze says further into the story that, "Jet is the smartest person he knows, except for his dad" -- uh okay, we've seen absolutely zero evidence in the story so far, but hey, whatever floats your boat dude.
Something that bothered me also was that we didn't seem to get a proper description of the main character anywhere. All I remember from the story was that she has long, black hair. The covers are not much help either, depicting two completely different girls - though as a general rule I don't think we should be relying on the cover to tell us what the main character looks like.
Andrijeski also has a habit of not mentioning things that may have been integral to understanding the story until later. Towards the very end of the book, Anaze and Jet are talking and he mentions something about how she acted in the raids... maybe this should have been said earlier, to give us more information on Jet, instead of randomly thrown in like the author has written the book off the top of their head and then not gone back to edit or flesh out the story and the characters more.
Add in a pointless love interest in the form of Anaze, who we only get scant bits of information about in the narrative, as if Jet doesn't really care about him too but in the end it's basically announced that no, they are totally besties, and also, he's in love with her. Plus Jet's pretty much total amnesia re: her brother who is only mentioned maybe a handful of times in the story, and we have a doozy here. The characters are horribly constructed and so is the story. Not even the scant action in the book with the dinosaur is enough to save it. Maybe if the author went back and did a total rewrite of the story, taking out the pointless information dumps early on and spreading out the necessary bits, as well as building upon the characters, this mess would be salvageable, but as it is it's just barely readable.
I'd give this book zero stars if I could, that's just how bad it is. As Andrijeski is seemingly a seasoned author, I don't have much hope for any of their other books, and I don't think I'd recommend this one to anybody.
Rating: 1/5 stars
★✰✰✰✰
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