I read The Fire Sermon last year and I loved it
so The Map of Bones was one of my
most anticipated releases of this year, mostly because The Fire Sermon ended on a cliffhanger and I wanted so badly to
know what was going to happen next in Cass’s story. So badly.
If you didn’t
read The Fire Sermon, then firstly:
why not? Secondly, the premise is pretty awesome. It’s a post-apocalyptic
series described as The Hunger Games
meets The Road and it’s set 400 years in the future, in a world that’s
turned primitive following some kind of nuclear fallout. Every person is born
with a twin, and each twin is either an Alpha (physically ‘perfect’) or an
Omega. The Alphas rule society, and not in a nice way either. Omegas are
ostracised and branded and the Alphas reign supreme. It’s all a bit shit. Oh, and the real sucker? When one twin dies,
so does the other. Cass (who is an awesomely awesome heroine, although a little
less so in The Map of Bones more on
that later) is an Omega fighting for the resistance and with big dreams of
equality; her twin, Zach (Alpha, obvs) is pretty high up on the Council and
dreams of the opposite. Awesome, right? Right.
So, what
did I make of Book 2 (catch up on my thoughts on book 1 here if you’re so
inclined)
Oh, erm,
SPOILERS PROBABLY.
I liked it.
Mostly. It did feel a little slow to get going, but, I think perhaps because book
1 ended the way it did and that still feels so
fresh in my mind (don’t talk to me about Kip please, I cannot) and I had unrealistically
expected that momentum to carry over when it couldn’t really because you know,
there has to be that element of reintroduction and setting things up for where
the story goes next. So yes, it felt a little slow, but it didn’t take long for
me to be reeled straight back in, hook,
line and sinker etcetera and I guess it kind of had to be a little bit more ‘filler’
because, bear in mind that this is the middle book of a trilogy. What I mean is
that if book 1 is the set up and book 3 is the grand finale it makes sense then
for book 2 to be the ‘how we get from 1 -3’ and as such a little bit less. Which sounds like a bad thing. It’s
not. I really really liked this book.
Let’s talk
about Cass for a minute. Cass was awesome in The Fire Sermon. I loved her so hard because she was this excellent
real flawed character and she owned
those flaws you know; she was excellent because of them and not in spite of
them. Does that even make sense? In my head it does. The thing about Cass is
that she’s ultra relatable – she’s just a girl and you can see yourself in her
somehow and you kind of love that she’s pretty terrified and doesn’t actually
really know what she’s doing but she’s getting up and doing it anyway. I liked her a little bit less here
though, because even though all of that is still true, she got just a little
bit high and mighty. There was an element of self-righteousness about her that
niggled with me, an attitude that suggested she felt her visions were the be
all and end all, that she was the one with the most to lose, that it was ‘all
about her.’ She has a bit of a nobody understands what I’m going through
attitude that frustrated me a little bit because seriously Cass, look who you’re
travelling with will you? Look around you oh my God. Anyhow, that said, she
also has a new found sense of confidence, which was excellent, she’s not as
tied to Zach – again, excellent, because that guy is a dick and she manages to hold her own in a way she didn’t quite
manage in book one and that made me proud. She has morals our Cass, and she’s
not afraid to stand by them and she will fight for what she believes is right
no matter what. Cass is still pretty damn awesome. Also awesome? Piper and Zoe?
Zoe, good gracious. I have so much love for that girl, so freaking
much.
The whole
world they live in terrifies me, no lie. The Council and their attitudes
terrifies me, the way most everybody views society terrifies me, the things we
find out about how they got to where they were and the events that led to it
and the lives of the people from Before, it all terrifies me and that’s a mark
of an excellent book in this genre I think. That and the whole social
commentary, which in these books is mostly centred around body image and is really
really fascinating and thought provoking and excellent. It’s not a fast paced
book, but neither was The Fire Sermon
and I think that works in it’s favour, the slow unravelling of the story, the
slow unfolding of events and the drip feeding of information just works somehow, it paints a much more
effective picture than if the story sped from one drama to another. It kind of
makes you believe that this world actually really exists for Haig and so it
kind of makes it exist for you too, and again with the no sense. I suck at this
sometimes. The Map of Bones is deeper
somehow than The Fire Sermon and
darker too, Its slow pacing makes it
detailed and that slow burn draws you in and holds you. The language is v
pretty (a baby’s skull the exact weight
of a nightmare and can’t you just tell that Haig is primarily a poet?). Also,
I loved that the whole moral dilemma of the dual-death thing carried forward
into this book, because that fascinated me in book 1: how can you win a war
when a casualty for the other side results in a casualty for your own, when
killing a Bad Guy also means killing an innocent. I can’t wait to see how it’s
all going to come together in the last book and once again I am the most
frustrated ever because I don’t want to
wait.
