Scavenging Book Stores and Libraries

The 100 starts off really well.  It’s not especially beautifully written or unique in plot or anything like that, but the set up is interesting and the three of the four characters held my interest.  We have a dystopian society in a box – the remainders of humanity floating around an irradiated Earth, running out of space and resources and with an increasing gap between the rich and poor.  Many small infractions lead to immediate execution – unless you’re under the age of eighteen.  In that case, they imprison you until you’re eighteenth birthday… And then they kill you.

The leaders decide to take one hundred of the underage prisoners and ship them down to Earth to see if it’s survivable.  There could be radiation, toxic food, plague, dangerous creatures…  Who knows what?  One hundred kids, down you go.  We’ll monitor whether you survive or not.

Sounds pretty cool, right?  Plus the CW is airing a show based on it starting this January (or is the book based off the show as a publicity stunt?  I don’t know).

I cruised through the first half of the book, enjoying this brain candy style science fiction novel.  There’s no hard science, the difficult questions aren’t being asked, it’s just teenagers engaging in adventure with a bunch of flashbacks to fill in the meat of the story.  There’s a little Lord of the Flies, a little Lost, and then…  halfway through it just goes goofy.  Love takes center stage over things like, you know, survival.  People stop thinking and start causing all kinds of mayhem – unintentionally, of course, though in situations where it was obvious they were making a poor choice…  And the back and forth love bit was getting so strange and so dramatic, I could only shake my head…

I will probably try out the show, but if there is a second book, I’m not making the effort there.