The Culling by Steven dos Santos
Release Date: March 8, 2013
Source: ARC
Pre-Order: Powell’s || Amazon
Lucian “Lucky” Spark has been recruited for training by the totalitarian government known as the Establishment. According to Establishment rules, if a recruit fails any level of the violent training competitions, a family member is brutally killed . . . and the recruit has to choose which one.
As the five recruits form uneasy alliances in the hellish wasteland that is the training ground, an undeniable attraction develops between Lucky and the rebellious Digory Tycho. But the rules of the training ensure that only one will survive–the strongest recruits receive accolades, wealth, and power while the weakest receive death. With Cole–Lucky’s four-year-old brother–being held as “incentive,” Lucky must marshal all his skills and use his wits to keep himself alive, no matter what the cost. — Goodreads
In a nutshell: The Hunger Games with a gay romance and a million times more contrivance!
Main Character: Lucky can apparently read all of your emotions in your eyes. Like, he can tell you entire paragraphs worth of your back story, because he saw you look at something. You were clearly looking longingly at that cupcake, but can never have it because of some deep traumatic past relationship, in which someone probably assaulted you with cupcakes and so your cupcake love can never be.
Yeah, this is going to be a snarktastic review, because I’ve got feelings.
I tried so hard to like this book. This book is basically a sloppy THG rip-off, which I would forgive because of my respect for the male-male romance, but it’s so poorly written that I can’t. But let’s start with my complaints about Lucky. The other recruits (the other players in The Hunger Games) are all more interesting than Lucky. They are soap opera ridiculous, but at least more interesting.
Lucky is supposedly super interested in protecting his little brother (much like Katniss/Prim) but Cole (the brother) really just gets lip service from Lucky. He never seems to have any real, thoughtful reflections on Cole while he’s off in The Hunger Games training, and most of his choices are motivated more by his love interests than by his supposed wish to protect Cole (more on this later). I just found it really hard to care about him, because he wasn’t actually that interesting or well developed.
Love Interest? Can I just say again how excited I was that this was a dystopian YA with a gay romance? I was so pumped. This review is going to be incredibly redundant because each category is going to begin with a reiteration about how fully disappointing this book was.
Digory is oh-so-perfect. He’s a charming golden boy who is also part of a resistance movement to overthrow the evil government AND he’s totally self-sacrificing in every conceivable way. The trouble with all this perfection is that while it may be dreamy, it’s also boring as shit. Although, still more interesting than Lucky.
Digory is contrasted by the only slightly more complex foil that is Cassius, Lucian’s cray cray ex-boyfriend. Cassius is like the dystopian YA version of Christian Grey. He’s mega powerful and mega controlling and basically condemns Lucky and his brother to certain death because Lucky “lied to him.”
Negligent Parents? Lucky’s parents are dead, as are several of the other main characters’ parents, due to the early mortality brought on by Reaper’s disease. The few recruits whose parents are alive seem to have abusive parents, though. Lucky has a Substitute Parent who could be halfway decent, except she’s too insufficiently developed for me to issue a verdict.
Ho Suspension? Lucky’s a ho fo sho, in the “thinking-with-your-genitals” sense of the great ho suspension tradition. Specifically, in spite of all the lip service that Lucky pays to his concern for his brother, his actions are almost always dictated by his feelings for his two love interests. Quite frankly, the incident that starts this story never made sense to me for Lucky’s stated purpose. It was completely illogical and while it was fantastically blown out of proportion by the series of contrivance that followed that initial decision, the only reason to justify his choice to get himself in trouble and appeal to Cassius for help was that he wanted to see his (ex?) boyfriend again, not some bullshit about protecting Cole. Because that made negative sense.
A+: Nothing? I kid. Maybe. I did enjoy the fellow recruits, even if they were absurd. Cypress is awesome and was probably my favorite character, even though her story suffered, like the whole book, from outlandish plot twists. I did appreciate that homosexuality was a non-issue in this world. It was probably one of the few trite/easy choices that Steven Dos Santos didn’t make, by letting the government’s cruelty be a separate issue. I liked that the fact that several main characters were gay was never made into an issue.
Fail: The plot. The world-building. I never believed this world. It didn’t make any sense. The government seemed to exist solely to create plot twists for Lucky. Everything that happened in this book happened so that Steven Dos Santos could have some new ludicrous plot device with his paper thin characters and universe. Nothing was fleshed out because if he had tried to do that, he would have seen how bullshit it all was. The very premise is ridiculous: The Hunger Games the recruitment and culling is how they create their military leadership? This is just a recipe for disaster for an evil government; you give the guns and power to the people with the most reason to hate you? Nobody saw this plan as a problem? Aside from the overarching plot/world, the whole bit with the fleshers in the middle of the book was also exceptionally nonsensical, and pointless. The balance between instilling absolute government loyalty and the underlying wish to escape is always weird and inconsistent.
The End: By the time you get to the end, you’ve been conditioned to accept bullshit. Within the larger framework of this bullshit, the very end wasn’t so bad. The scene shortly before the end is the biggest #hosuspension of all for Lucky, because for the milliontieth time, he pays lip service to caring about his brother without actually making choices which reflect that priority. The final scene tries to be this beautiful moment for one of the other recruits but, as with the rest of this story, ends up being trite and ridiculous.
And so: The Goodreads folk who have already read this all seem to love it, and I don’t understand. So maybe there’s something I’m missing, but I did not enjoy this book. Just to make sure you absolutely get the point: this book was thoroughly disappointing.
For Traumateers who love: I don’t know. If you just REALLY love dystopian novels and don’t mind them being formulaic and ill-conceived, and are super stoked about the idea of a gay romance in a dystopian YA, then you might enjoy this. Or maybe for Traumateers who love to rant about shit? There are actually a lot of you in that category.
Final Grade: D
Nicole is the co-captain of Snark Squad and these days she spends most of her time editing podcasts. She spends too much time on Twitter and very occasionally vlogs and blogs. In her day job she's a producer, editor, director, and sometimes host of educational YouTube channels. She loves travel, maps, panda gifs, and semicolons. Writing biographies stresses her out; she crowd sourced this one years ago and has been using a version of it ever since. She would like to thank Twitter for their help.
