Review: Fable for the End of the World

Fable for the End of the World by Ava Reid
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In the Acknowledgments, the author states that this book was inspired by Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games. The parallels are obvious: like Panem, this is a post-apocalypse dystopia (post-climate-change in this case, although there was evidently some sort of nuclear exchange as well) where the downtrodden masses are kept under control by their addiction to a brutal "game." In this case it is the Gauntlet, where trained teenage assassins pursue people (sometimes children, offered up by their parents, as is the case with the protagonist Inesa) who are so far into debt to the ruling corporation Caerus that they will never get out. The Gauntlet, and its sacrificial Lambs--literally--is livestreamed every few months, to distract the general populace from the misery of their living conditions.

In this future, the United States is apparently no more, having broken up into smaller city-states. The two we are focusing on are New England and New Amsterdam. The former still has nuclear capacity, as evidenced by the irradiated border between the two , which has spawned numerous animal and human mutations. New Amsterdam is the poorer of the two, slowly drowning from sea level rise. This is where Inesa, her brother Luka, and their mother live, in a ramshackle shack perched on stilts to keep it out of the rising water. Luka is a hunter, and Inesa is a taxidermist, preserving the dwindling numbers of non-mutated animals. (Although that is a very ironic definition of "preserving," as she stuffs them after they're dead to serve as a record for when normal animals finally vanish.) Inesa's mother has many problems, including, it would seem, mental illness: she has "sold her soul to the company store" to the point when she reaches the red five-hundred-thousand-dollar credit limit of her debt to the evil corporation Caerus, she offers up her daughter to the Gauntlet to avoid having to run it herself.

(Which of course makes her a cartoon evil antagonist, even worse than Caerus. Fortunately, we don't see her beyond one or two scenes. The author tries to inject some nuance into her character, but that pretty much falls flat.)

Our second protagonist is Melinoe (four syllables, like Chloe), the so-called Angel, or trained assassin, who pursues the Lambs to their deaths. Melinoe has been augmented by Caerus to the point where she's more cyborg than human, including an artificial eye with night vision. But as the story opens, she is suffering full-blown PTSD from her last Gauntlet, where she executed a young girl. She cannot get over this or forget it, despite repeated memory wipes from her handler. In a last-ditch attempt to redeem her, Mel is assigned to Inesa's Gauntlet, to serve as a hopefully audience-grabbing contrast: the ice-cold blond Angel pursuing another young girl her own age. Inesa, with the help of her brother Luka, has thirteen days to evade Melinoe and/or fight her and survive. The Gauntlet takes Inesa and Mel through the wilds of New Amsterdam, where they run into increasingly mutated animals--and mutated humans, called Wends, who attack them both. This forces the girls to work together, and of course the inevitable happens: after Mel is cut off from her handler, by virtue of Luka smashing the comm chip implanted in her temple, she and Inesa end up falling in love.

The romance is handled well enough, I suppose: it's a slow burn, and the sex takes place offstage. Still, it's a bit icky in a way, as Mel has killed how many people?--even though she has been manipulated and brainwashed by Caerus. This relationship takes center stage in the final half of the book, and your view of it will undoubtedly color your overall impression of the book. Mel and Inesa attempt to break free from Caerus, only to discover the cameras they thought were off have been following them all this time, laying bare what has been happening between them to a massive global audience. Another Angel is sent after them, and at the climax, Inesa "wins" by killing this second Angel, who seriously injures Mel. Mel is taken back to Caerus and given a final memory wipe, and then married off to one of the evil old Caerus executives (which is really icky. I could have done without that plot point, for sure). The book ends with Inesa, newly rich from her win, following Mel to New Amsterdam's capital city, where she is hoping to meet up with her love and make Mel remember.

I liked this well enough, but it's not as good as some other dystopian YA I've read. The relationship between Inesa and Luka is a high point, as well as Inesa's grittiness and determination to survive. The worldbuilding could have been better: this doesn't feel as real and lived-in as Panem. It all depends on how much you like Hunger Games knock-offs, I suppose.

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