Review Detail

This is one of the most emotionally draining books I’ve ever read. Patrick Ness went all out; he didn’t sugarcoat things and he didn’t try to spare the reader’s feelings. The end result was 500 of the most exhausting pages I’ve ever read. The final sentence made me want to collapse in bed and sleep forever (what’s worse, the final book is most likely going to be 20 times more intense).

This, officially, is what real dystopian (and/or post-apocalyptic) fiction should look like. Slavery, torture, bombings, people branded like livestock—The Ask and the Answer is unflinchingly violent, but also brutally real. I was, honestly, a little shocked that Ness was able to get away with some of the scenes in this book. But I loved them. This series isn’t some stroll through the woods where the protagonist moons over her love interest for the majority of the text while there’s some sort of “bad government” going on.

However, at the end, there were some questions I hadn’t found answers for, especially in regards to colonizing the new planet. It seems like everyone spoke the same language—ostensibly English—and had white skin. In picking who would get to travel on the ships to a new planet, were only white English-speakers considered? I don’t get it. I would definitely like more information on what was happening on Earth that necessitated colonization, and how that entire situation went down. And, as always, nobody who died stayed dead.