 There was no real reason for me to do this You know I There are a hundred other terrible books that I could be reading Slash reviewing slash making fun of out there. There's there's a million of them, but This one called to me, you know from the moment I first heard about Save the Pearls and I read Just the summary of the first book It called to me like it was saying come here and mock me also by the way this video was sponsored by boardwalk they Did not pay me for it, but they did give me the shirt for free So if you like this shirt and want to see this or some others like it then maybe check them out But yes, the title of this is accurate like ten years after it became irrelevant I read Save the Pearls and just like with way of the shadow wolves I am having my notes on here because there's just too much of them. I would not write those out by hand I'm just I'm just not doing it and Some of you saw the title to this video and you thought oh Oh, God, he's doing it. He's doing it. Why is he doing it? And some of you saw the title and thought racist hunger games. What what is he talking about and Basically, those are the people who have heard of Save the Pearls and the people who have not and The title is not clickbait. This is basically just the hunger games if the hunger games was extremely racist so this book came out in 2012 and the sequel followed in 2013 and That was you know when the dystopian young adult boom was at its height you know, I've talked about some books like that before like a couple of months ago I did the testing and made fun of that one and This falls into that similar category like it's a dystopian novel about a young teenage girl and There's an authoritarian government and she tries to change the system sort of and I mean Here's the thing most of the genre's entries just put in an authoritarian authoritarian government and had people overthrow it and The message was just authoritarianism is bad, which is true You know and there's nothing wrong with that But they weren't talking about any like real issues in the real world the way the hunger games was in the way dystopian dystopias as a genre are usually supposed to do This book Save the Pearls does try to tackle an actual societal problem Just does a really bad job of it in a post apocalyptic world where resistance to an overheated environment defines class and beauty Eden Newman's white skin brands her as a member of the lowest class a weak and ugly pearl The clock is ticking if Eden doesn't mate before her 18th birthday She'll be left outside to die if only a dark-skinned coal from the ruling class will pick up her mate option She'll be safe, but no matter how much Eden darkens her skin and hair She's still a pearl still ugly cursed with a tragically low mate rate of 15% Just maybe one coal sees the real Eden and will save her She has begun secretly dating her handsome co-worker Jamal But when Eden unwittingly compromises her father's secret biological experiment She is thrown into the eye of a storm and the remaining patch of rainforest a strange and dangerous land Eden must fight to save her father who may be humanity's last hope while standing up to a powerful Beastman she believes is her enemy despite her overwhelming attraction to survive Eden must change But only if she can redefine her ideas of beauty and of true love so in this story White people are called pearls and black people are called coals Oh dear, you know throughout this whole series. I am not going to be referring to them as pearls and coals I'm good just gonna be calling them black people and white people. I hope you're all okay with that Like coal is an actual slur for black people like it's not a very common one So I don't blame you if you've never heard that before but it is an actual slur it is used by racists and It's even weirder because all of the other races here get to be precious gems like white people are pearls Latino people are tiger's eyes and Asian people are ambers so Why don't black people get to be a precious gem? You know you could have called them onyx or jet or Obsidian and you know it would still be a little bit cringy But at least it wouldn't be an actual goddamn slur Jesus Christ now if you have heard of this book before It's probably because there was controversy when it came out You know it made a bit of a splash back in 2012 you know there were blog posts and people on social media were yelling about it and that sort of thing and I didn't hear about it until years later, but I thought well It can't be that bad, right? You know like the internet overreacts to this sort of thing So maybe there's a few problematic aspects to it or maybe there's some offensive stereotypes But it can't be that bad and then I read the summary and I was like okay that doesn't sound good But I mean I don't know for sure no it really is that bad The only thing that stops this from being the most racist book. I've ever read is that I've also read mine comp Okay, okay, that's that's a joke. It's the most racist thing. I've ever read that wasn't written by just outright white supremacists like I'm genuinely surprised you can have this much anti-black racism and something without dropping the n-bomb at least once Now in addition to using an actual racial slur to describe a group of people there's a Number of other issues will be going over here like it's still Stereotypes black folks in some unpleasant ways it refers to them as beastly or beast like a lot and It doesn't really seem to understand what race is to begin with like we'll we'll get to that later Don't worry and I guess this one isn't racist, but it is weird it kind of forgets that races other than black people and white people exist and Again, we'll get into a lot of this as we go on but The author claimed on her blog after the book came out that Cole was not a slur and she said hey Cole is actually useful, you know, you can use it to heat your homes and stuff whereas pearls are just pointless and for decoration Which is really not The comeback that I think she thought it was because she's basically saying hey black people you're useful because we can burn you for energy and It's even weirder because the absolute lowest of the low in this world's society are Albino people and they're referred to as cottons Cotton is also useful. You use it to make clothes and stuff I don't think she thought this through at all and plus other races But like I said are named after gems too, but they're those are just as used Yeah, those are just as useless as pearls, but they're still above white people in this social order. I just I Don't understand. It's like every aspect of this was not thought through and when the author was promoting it She even made a trailer and that trailer features an actress wearing blackface Do you want to see? I've heard rumors of what happens They come in the middle of the day when you're sleeping and take you outside Where you catch the heat? The thing is there's no proof at all and that's because you never again hear from those who don't meet by their 18th birthday Too late for that you're 18 today aren't you and you haven't made it for your own good. Why don't you just go to sleep? Go ahead drink it No, are you sure? That is Not great and the production values are just so hilariously low I'm pretty sure I spent more money on this video than Whoever funded that trailer spent on it like and I'm not even paying an actress or anything. That is just Sad just sad on every level and I will say real quick That most of the racism here is front-loaded. So like the first 70-ish pages of the first book is where most of it's gonna be and where I'm gonna talk about most of it But then there is more stuff sprinkled throughout. Don't worry. It's not like it ends there And I will talk about the racism a lot at first But then I'm gonna be moving on to other stuff because there's plenty Plenty of other things to criticize here. Believe you me like From the very beginning it fails Just as a book, you know, it's horribly put together and not well written and yada yada all that stuff You come here to hear me talk about but later on it goes so crazy I almost forgot about all the bigotry like I straight up like at the beginning you can go page by page literally and point out all the Unpleasantness there, let's say but by the time I finished the second book and I went back to go over my notes I almost forgot about a lot of it because it just goes in such a strange direction Now if you're not at all interested in hearing about All that racism stuff, then I suppose you could skip ahead But you know, you will be missing out on stuff from the beginning of the book So I'd still recommend watching it and obviously Yes, I'm white That doesn't mean I don't know the smell of bullshit. You know, I can recognize problems here I can recognize this stuff and point out what's going on here and Other reviewers who are black have talked about this book and have pointed out many of the same issues I'm going to be pointing out so it's not like I'm getting offended on behalf of someone who is okay with it they've talked about what they hate here plenty on their own and I'm just adding my voice to the pile and I feel the need to bring this up because recently some people have been claiming that Acknowledging stereotypes exist that those stereotypes are untrue and that you're playing into those stereotypes is The same as agreeing with those stereotypes, you know, they're saying like ah you pointed out the racist stereotypes that Exist in this thing that means you believe in those stereotypes. Therefore. You're the real racist and No, that's not how that works. That's just a cheap way of trying to deflect blame and I mean, if you're not deflecting blame and use genuinely believe that it's probably because you're a very fucking stupid person Now, let's also get one thing out of the way the books author Victoria Foyt. I Don't think she wrote this to be hateful or derogatory. I think that she genuinely wanted to do something good I think she genuinely wanted to be Anti-racist and she wanted to talk about how discrimination is bad She just did a really bad job of it Like she seems to know that racism is bad She just doesn't seem to know what it is or how it works and she wrote a lot defending herself like on her blog and stuff and You can check out some of those posts on your own if you're curious, but You know, she claimed that she was colorblind and she understands what it's like to be different and discriminated against because people made fun of her hair when she was younger Don't think that's the same thing, but okay And if someone is genuinely this racist in a hateful way because trust me it gets bad Then they would probably say something like well, this is just how things work If you don't like it, then you're just not wanting to admit it like a lot of time Racists especially especially hardcore ones are under the impression that everyone secretly agrees with them But we're just not admitting to it because we don't want to face social backlash for being honest and No, that's that's not true. Obviously like most of us just disagree with them and don't like them and While the books do a really bad job of it, it they're definitely trying to send a message of discrimination being bad you know like Victoria Foy was in her 50s when this came out and Remember it came out 10 years ago So like she grew up in a very different world than a lot of us, you know, she doesn't really understand a lot of things That we just kind of take for granted today, you know, sometimes people just say or do things that are offensive or hurtful Without meaning to you know, they're not doing it maliciously and this goes for like talking about groups of people, you know Races religions etc. But it also goes for like individuals, you know Sometimes you'll say something that accidentally strikes a nerve with somebody and you don't mean to do so But it still hurts their feelings Doing this doesn't make you a bad person because you're just ignorant at that point What makes you a bad person is not acknowledging that what you did was wrong and refusing to change I don't know this whole thing just kind of reminds me of that scene from the first rush hour movie where Jackie Chan Accidentally starts a fight with the bartender What's up my nigga? What did you just say? What's up my nigga? Like yeah, what he said there was racist, but It's kind of hard to be mad at him like he didn't know any better You know, you just you tell them what they did was wrong and why it's wrong and then hopefully they can change like I'm pretty sure That's the sort of thing that happened here. You may very well disagree with me, but I don't know I would encourage you to at least watch this and Read the books and come to your own conclusions. I just don't think that Victoria Foyt is a bad person I think she's stupid and I think she has too much of an ego to ask other people for help when trying to understand a New topic that she doesn't know much about but I Don't think she's a bad person now normally I wouldn't do this But I did make PDFs of both books and I'm sharing them with all of you They should be in the pinned comment down below. You should be able to find them and I mean, they're not the highest quality PDFs but like you're getting them for free so don't complain too much and The thing is I did that mostly because it's difficult to find these books like not the first one That one's not too bad this one I got for like $20 on Amazon, which is a little pricey but nothing too crazy the second book this Was a fucking ordeal to get like I the only one I saw available was on American Amazon And that was for $150 and I was like I'm not gonna pay that and then a couple days later Disappeared and that's when I actually put out a video a couple months ago asking for help looking for a copy and then someone pointed me to one on Amazon France which I Bought for around 50 US dollars and then I waited for it to come here And I waited almost two months and it didn't arrive when it was supposed to so I had to Contact the seller and then they told me yeah it's lost in the mail and then I had to wait for a refund and then I looked back at American Amazon and The one that was there before Was available again, and it was only about $50 and then I ordered it and it came in without any further issues And if you want an idea of how long this whole process took I wanted this video to be out in March now I've read other reviews of this book, but they're not recent You know pretty much all of them are from 10 years ago when it came out and a lot of them are also on like Blogs or tumblr posts or something which are just no longer around they've been deleted or their websites are no longer hosted And while some of them are pretty good reviews, they mostly just talk about the racism You know they don't really go over all of the other issues here Like that's a big part of what makes these books so terrible, but it's only a part on Every level these fail like the story Basically ceases to exist after the opening act and then it goes off in so many different directions Like I I just ran out of breadcrumbs and couldn't find my way home like that this shit strays So far off the path that by the end it is barely recognizable as racist hunger games The protagonist Eden is somehow simultaneously a complete blank slate an author self-insert and an Absolutely horrible person like all at once. I don't know how that's possible, but it happens here I found a bunch of typos or but not a bunch of typos But more typos than are acceptable in a published novel and any themes that The author tried to send are so twisted that they wind up sending the opposite message in a lot of times And just don't even get me started on the animal sex. Just don't even it's it's an absolute mess Overall, it's just a huge mess, but the thing is other than the racism The worst part by far is just how boring this is You know, there's huge segments of this of this series where just nothing happens and I don't I don't know how long this review is gonna be it might be shorter than I initially thought it was going to just because There's so much stuff right it's go. Yeah, and then nothing happens for a while. I I don't know. We'll have to see but like Conflict the conflict in the story barely exists You know you you have this setup with I was gonna say a neat world but it's not a neat world, but it is a world that has plenty of potential for conflicts and There's just none it doesn't come up and then even within the romance which takes up a huge chunk of the story There isn't much conflict there, you know, there's no real will they or won't they There's no real them trying to get over their own personal flaws in order to be together or anything like that It's just kind of they're in love now and everything's perfect and Well, that's enough of an intro. This has been a long one, but that's enough of an intro Let's get started on save the pearls book one Revealing Eden Eden jumped at the sound of approaching steps. They must not see hide beauty map Her mental command caused the life ban She wore to send a tiny white spark into the air in a flash the holographic images that appeared in front of her a blonde girl Playing on a sunlit beach disappeared What's going on a woman asked Eden shot to her feet her heart racing as a plump dark-skinned lab assistant appeared on the other side of The partition it was only peach who wasn't as cruel as the rest of them. Oh boy, that's That's not a good start It is a little confusing what Eden is up to at the beginning like she's doing something She's not supposed to be doing but all we know about her her surroundings Where she is is that she's watching kids playing on a beach and it's apparently some sort of hologram that she's watching maybe describe it in a little bit more detail, you know set the scene and Also the them that she's referring to in italics because you need to put emphasis on it We find out pretty quickly that that's black people. So Yeah, just not a not a good start Eden's blank emotional mask slammed into place never let them see how you feel She said what do you mean? Didn't you monitor the test subjects medications peach said yes, of course Eden couldn't afford to make a mistake Then why isn't the report on schedule had peach forgotten that Eden's skin only had a dark coating Maybe she was passing after all wouldn't that be nice even almost enjoyed pointing out the truth Okay, so it turns out that Eden was basically just watching TV while she's at work like she works as a lab assistant and She's supposed to be doing something else, but she's just essentially watching TV, but let's not focus on that Let's focus on the fact that she's wearing blackface in this world They call it a coating and in fact on the cover of this book You can see half of Eden's face is white and the other half is her wearing her blackface coating And it's supposed to protect lighter skinned people from radiation because in this world basically at some point solar radiation got Really bad and out of hand and it got bad enough that people get skin cancer super easy and now they all live underground and The thing is because black people are just more resistant to that there are more of them And then they became in charge of society And the thing is if radiation was really that bad then a little melanin in your skin wouldn't make that make that much difference now I'm willing to overlook some scientific inaccuracies. So that alone is not a huge problem But it is worth pointing out but again like white people wear coating over their skin to help protect them from all this radiation and So for a huge chunk of this book the main character Eden is walking around with a dark paste on her skin to make her look like she's black and honestly It just made me picture Caitlyn Olsen in lethal weapon 6 the entire time I was reading my love When I look deep in your eyes, I find my own destiny now I get that Victoria Foyt was trying to put blackface into a different context and Try and like change the way it works in this world as compared to our world But that there's just too much historical baggage associated with it You know you are you're much better off just avoiding that issue entirely and they even mentioned later that there are performers That do minstrel shows in whiteface So Foyt knows that impersonating other races is often used in a derogatory manner but she still did it here and Like we're literally on the first page plus it's just dumb for other reasons number one They live underground so there really shouldn't be this much solar radiation all over the place So they shouldn't need to have to wear coatings on their skin. It shouldn't be a big deal Number two wearing the coating is mandatory and being in public without it is illegal for white people and It's even mentioned that Eden has barely ever seen her parents without it and that makes me think why Why would that be illegal like this is supposed to be a reversal of real-world race relations There was no points that I am aware of Where black people were forced to hide the fact that they were black and like put flour on their skin or something and Number three Eden also has to coat her hair because her hair is naturally blonde and it she makes it black which How does that help anything is It's supposed to be a reference to how black people and white people's hair grows indifferent. I I Genuinely don't know so basically this opening scene Like I said Eden is working as an assistant in a laboratory and she needs to pass on some reports But she can't do it because her supervisor a Sheena has not come in to approve the reports yet because she's off Slacking somewhere and then peaches the woman who came up to her is understanding about it and then just leaves her alone So Eden just watches some ducks fly on a hologram Which like I guess they're underground so they just have holograms of like trees and shit around to make people feel less depressed Which is fine. I guess but while she's watching the ducks fly around she uses their scientific name, which is Anas Plutiorin chose and She actually does that a lot like with various animals and plants like she'll see them and think of their regular name and then think of their scientific name in her head and I think it's done as a way to make Eden seem smarter and make the book seem more scientific, but It it fails at that like it's just pretentious and awkward, you know, no one talks like this No one even thinks like this. I don't even think actual scientists will do that But then this happens Eden slumped back in her chair with a heavy sigh I'm a stone in a cool dark cave the small hologramic image Repeared in front of her while she repeated this soothing thought over and over Soon the constant jumbled noise of the world band that screamed into her head grew distant in that quiet Treasured space she allowed her one small but true thought. I hate them Wow She just She just came out and said it Literally on the second page of the book the main character came right out and said that she hates black people Yeah, you know, I was I was expecting that I would have to like examine her actions over the course of the series and Point out how she's a terrible person based on that, but She she just came out and said it Page two and the thing is this never comes back up Like not once in the entire series does it come back up that she apparently just really hates black people Like if this was acknowledged early on as a flaw in the character and something That's wrong with her and then over the course of the story Eden worked past it then I Guess it could have been fine. You know, she could have decided by the end like you know what? I don't hate black people I hate people that treat me as lesser and I hate the system that is keeping me down But race is not something that you can judge people off of like it I Just instead she just starts dating black dudes after a while and we pretend that she never said that and Honestly dating black people when you just outright hate black people is weird I want to unpack that but I am nowhere near qualified. So I'm gonna let someone else deal with it But like just from that moment Do I even need to go over the rest of this fucking book? All of the problems with it are in the first two pages. I think I mean, I'm gonna keep going obviously, but just I Okay, okay So Eden thinks back to her mom for a minute because we need some exposition and her mom died of the heat which is just skin cancer and Eden mentions that she has never even been outside like she's been underground her whole life. I Don't know how solar radiation would get underground like I think rocks and dirt block that pretty good But again, and you know, she also during her long exposition thoughts She just straight up says that pearls is a racist term for whites Which is weird because pearls is used almost exclusively to describe white people So I'm not sure like what wouldn't they have like a different name for themselves or something I just I don't know. I don't know man. I don't know So because everyone's underground and they don't get to see nature or anything most people use these things called life bans To see holograms and explore hologram worlds, which is Okay, fine that makes sense and Eden's life band was given to her by the government and she thinks like well At least the government cares about me Which is weird because a huge part of this early book is about how they're about to cut her off from her food supply Like she needs to mate before she turns 18 or by the time she turns 18. Otherwise She's gonna die So you think she would hate them? You know, you think she would hate the government as like the represent the representation or the epitome or whatever you want to call it of Just this world's racism and the way that she's being kept down like you'd think she would hate them But I guess not a familiar rush of pleasure mixed with fear course through her at the site of the white girl Images of pearls in natural coloring were forbidden if they caught Eden looking She would be punished and yet she couldn't resist watching the pale slim girl bounce a multicolored ball over to a young man Who was also white-skinned? She wore a polka dot bikini all that skin exposed Nearby other whites lounged on thick towels or cabana chairs or played cards at tables out in broad daylight Sunshine glittered on a blue ocean that stretched across the semi-circular Cove like a big happy smile Children lots of them even siblings chased after the rushing ocean waves back and forth Their shrill screams floated on the air, but these were screams of joy not terror So she watches kids frolicking out in the sun on the beach as a fantasy but it's illegal to see white people on video for reasons Which is again weird. I don't think there was ever a time period where it was illegal to show black people on TV and The thing is I know I said that Foyt Wrote this out of ignorance, you know, I don't think she meant to be this hateful and I stand by that But moments like this nearly changed my mind because holy fucking shit. Does that have some serious 14 words energy? Like I could see this idea working as like she yearns for Freedom and she yearns to be outside outside of this if it was not really specified that it's white people playing like if it was Just people of all races playing together on a beach and she's like looking at nature and trees and jungles and stuff And she's thinking wow, I wish I could be out there Then I think this would be fine But like the fact that it's it's portraying this is like oh white people are so horribly oppressed and like I I Guess that's kind of the point but like Jesus fucking Christ. I just know or no so Eden complains a little bit about how Being blonde and having blue eyes is no longer considered pretty and That is one part of this book that I think works Okay, because it is accurate that beauty standards change over time like that. That's one thing this book gets right If you don't believe me, you can watch movies from the early 2000s where women insult each other by saying your butt is big Where nowadays that's considered very attractive and you know paleness used to be sexy Which is why in paintings of Queen Elizabeth. She looks like a fucking ghost Nowadays being tan is considered attractive Which is why the Kardashians have been trying so hard to make themselves look Latina but Eden just spends a lot of time whining about it and a lot of time wishing she was darker and The thing is couldn't you like go to a tanning bed or something wouldn't they have that in this world like Maybe it'd be stupid because it give you cancer But I mean gives you cancer in your life and people do it and like you could do that get a few shades darker I don't know But the thing is there are worse aspects to the racism here that she experiences Maybe you should focus on those, you know focus on like various types of discrimination She has like she can't get certain jobs and people look at her suspiciously on the street And the government has specific laws in place trying to prevent her from doing things like things like that You know just Imagine a reversal of this, you know, imagine a book about a black girl Who's just desperate to get a white boyfriend and wishing that she was blonde and you know Having difficulties with that and you can kind of sympathize with that but in the background all of her friends are slaves Like it would be stupid because you're like, okay, there's yes You're having some problems with racism, but other people are having much worse ones And so Eden and her dad are working at this lab because her dad is a genius and they're working on some sort of super secret experiment We we don't know exactly what it is or what it's about yet But we just know it's top secret and it's super important at last Eden hurt Ashina's brisk footsteps on the concrete floor and stole a glance at her nemesis Envious of the beauty's easy confidence voluptuous with raising colored skin everything about Ashina screamed ruling class All right, first of all, it's super cringy to describe people's skin color by comparing it to food You know, I don't know why that became such a common thing, but it's a very common thing We should stop doing it. It's just weird and cringy like they don't do it with white people You know, they you or at least they usually don't do it with white people. So they just maybe just stop and secondly Every black person we meet in this story is super super dark skinned Which is not how it is in real life like I Actually had a bunch of jokes for this moment, but I feel like I'm treading Dangerous ground already. So I'm not gonna make any of them But basically it would be kind of neat if we saw some black people who were Lighter skin than others and there was still some discrimination Based on that like well, we're both black, but I'm darker than you so I'm better like There's discrimination within races because that's a real thing that does happen and we could realize that these sorts of Relations are complex affairs. You know, you could write something about that. It would be kind of interesting. You could have You know something to say maybe but it's not there and Ashina we're told that Ashina must have a super high mate rate while Edens is only about 15% and That is not explained in a lot of detail, but basically what it is there's some sort of planet-wide network where it just tells you am I hot or not and everyone is entered into it and When you turn 18 you have to get mated Which is they don't really have marriage in this world. We'll get to that later but like you have to Be making children by that point, but at the same time everyone is only allowed one child It's it's kind of weird and if you don't If you're not mated by that age Then you get cut off from your food supply and left outside to die and Edan is six months away from turning 18 So she like the clocks running out and she's getting nervous or Maybe they're just cut off from their food supply that's provided by the government and they just get to live Underground on their own after that Because later we see people who have aged out and have been cut off but they're still walking around underground and Living their lives, you know something an editor might have caught plus We know that there is money in this world like there's jobs and people get paid for it And they mention it more than once like couldn't you just buy your own food like Maybe it would be expensive to live that way But you know people seem to have found a way to survive like I don't know man I don't know just this plot This plot maybe could have worked if you didn't have the racial aspect to it Like it makes the government seem oppressive if people are forced to have children Even if they don't really want them by a certain age Otherwise they're killed like it makes this government and this world seem awful and dystopian and oppressive, but The thing is even though this world is supposed to be super stratified based on race And it's supposed to suck to be white Everyone is targeted by this policy like everyone needs to do it It's not just towards white people. So is is this government really racist or not like a I don't know It's also kind of dumb that 18 is the cutoff Because you know, you think it would be like 25 or something So you're not just cutting them off before most of their reproductive years like before they even have a chance to really Do it or try anything? And honestly, there's just a shitload of exposition in this first chapter Like, you know, they'll have like two paragraphs of the actual story moving forward and then a page of exposition And then two more paragraphs and then a page of exposition and my god, it is just obnoxious So Ashina asks Eden to send in the report before she goes on break and Eden says she already sent in the report and Ashina acts very rational when confronted with this information Ashina jumped up and grabbed Eden's lab coat. Are you calling me a liar? Eden flinched one of them was touching her white hot light exploded in her in her head before she knew it She blurted out an incendiary racial slur. Get your hands off me. You damn coal Victoria you said this wasn't a slur like you defended yourself by claiming that coal was not a slur and then right there It just said that it's a fucking slur. I Is it a slur because there's a swear word in front? Like if you call someone a Jew, that's fine But if you call them a fucking Jew, that's not fine. Like is that what's happening here? I don't know man. I'm shooting in the dark and my gun is full of blanks We are on page 10 So when this happens everyone else in the lab, which is mostly black people forms a mob and then immediately attacks Eden and Eden straight up says oh my god, they're about to kill me and we're just moving past that because we don't have time So her father who remembers the head scientist here despite being white Sees this and he calls out to her and he calls her dot which is short for daughter And it's really stupid and it's desperate to sound different and it just comes up a lot like I Don't know Anyone who just refers to their kids as son and daughter like to their face So having a shortened form of that as a nickname is weird Like maybe you could come up with some sort of backstory reason for why that's the case, but we don't get one here So Eden rums from the mob for about a paragraph before she runs into the boss of the whole lab Who is a fellow named Ronson Bramford? It's a weird name. Is it just me or is that a weird name? It seems like a weird name and then he tells them hey go back to work And they just instantly disperse like you know this angry lynch mob just instantly disperses With a couple of words Because that's how things work. That's how people Work, you know that that's such a thrilling action scene, you know I had so much time to to get into it. So Ronson is tall Handsome super dark skinned and he's somehow Super wealthy and has a lot of political influence and is in charge of this lab and has a long tragic backstory Despite being 22 years old Like the thing is when I read this I straight up forgot he was 22 years old in my mind He was like 35 because he just has so much life that he's already lived But then I was putting my notes together and it mentioned he was 22 years old and I was like oh oh Okay, like this dude has an ex-wife and a child and He's only that age. It's just it's just a weird thing to me like I guess Spoiler alert. I hope you don't mind Bramford and Eden start dating at one point and I suppose it is better for a 17-year-old girl to date a 22-year-old man than to date a 35-year-old man, but still It is just a very strange thing like it. I know I'm focusing on this a bit more than I probably should but it just Gets in my mind every time I think of Bramford. They're like he's 22 so Bramford tells off a Sheena and tells her to get back to work and then he spent some time talking to Eden and her dad and we also note at this time that his bodyguard is named Shen and Shen is half black and half Asian and at this point we learn that Asian people are called Ambers and the Tino people are called Tiger's Eyes Like I said earlier and according to this book series Those are the only four races that exist white people black people Asians and Latinos Now it's time for a very long tangent like this is a very horribly stupid way of organizing things And if you don't believe me, let me just ask you where would Indian people fit in this system like people from India? Where would Middle Eastern people fit? Where would Native Americans fits? I don't know where they'd be and like one group of people who are not mentioned in this book series at all one ethnic group that has probably gotten more shit than anyone else in history are Jews and They're they're not in here like how would they fit in like sure you could say maybe The Jews were like rolled into one of the other races like white people or something But do you think that people are just gonna let go of centuries of anti-semitism immediately? Like no like especially if you're suddenly near the bottom of the social totem pole totem pole You're gonna look for someone to look down on be like well, I'm white, but at least I'm not Jewish like that That would be a thing. That's what people do cuz they're cunts, but Just this is never even mentioned and the thing is those are the four big races in the United States But there are others, you know, there's smaller groups. Like I said American Indians Middle Eastern people that sort of thing. This is a very America-centric view of things Which could maybe work like I could see a world where this idea works like if it went out if they went out into like other countries and stuff and they saw that The way it works where they live is different than in other places then it could point out like hey This is actually not very smart. It's not a good way of organizing things But the book treats it as this as if it's universal The thing is the definition of race changes depending on time period and location. So People getting split into easily recognized categories might make sense to you But if you go to a different place then they just have a different way of organizing things Like for example Here they describe people as Asian and by that they mean East Asian because in the United States usually when we say Asian We mean East Asian people. So like people from Korea Japan China Whereas in the United Kingdom when they say Asian, they usually mean South Asian. So like India Pakistan Bangladesh cuz They just have a bigger South Asian community than we do but Anyways, the point is all East Asian people tend to get lumped together by Americans Like Japanese Chinese Korean all them But if you actually go over to those countries and you ask them if they're all the same race They're gonna say no Like there is a hell of a lot of racism against From like Japanese people to Korean people and Korean people to Vietnamese people and so on and so forth like It's pretty bad. Even though we all tend to lump them together Then there's other examples of this too Like the Yugoslav Wars were basically just a bunch of groups of white people killing other white people for being the wrong kind of white Or the Rwandan genocide was one group of black people killing a different group of black people for being the wrong kind of black like and even people that are lumped in as white can look quite a bit different from one another like you know Irish people are much much paler than Italian people usually and Like I said earlier Africans vary quite a bit in terms of skin tone like depending on what part of Africa you're from or your ancestors are from you could be Super super dark or much lighter like it. There's a lot of variation there and Latino people just Latino just doesn't make sense as a racial category even if we treat it as one like the term literally just means anyone from Latin America so Mexico all the way down to Argentina But the thing is people over the past couple hundred years have come in there from all over the world Like there's people there that are whiter than me and not one or two of them Millions, you know, you go to Brazil Mexico Uruguay wherever there's white people there and there's other races too Like there's indigenous Americans Asian people etc. Like there's a lot of them and they're all Latino like Stereotypically the stereotypical Latino is a misdezo person, which is someone with a combination of European and indigenous ancestry But that that's not all of them, you know, like this person is a Latino But so is this one and this one and this one like this caste system that they set up in this book implies that racial differences are very easy to define and that they're Immutable facts of nature when they just they just aren't like There are differences between groups of people, you know, things like skin tone height Propensity towards certain genetic diseases, you know, that sort of thing like there are differences But the way we categorize those differences is based on societal expectations. It's arbitrary Now a smart author who understood that would probably have pointed that out and they could maybe do something with it Like have Indian people like India Indian people get lumped in with Latinos because they have a similar skin tone And then people say that that's kind of dumb like they say what we're no we're different from each other Why are we getting lumped in together or have white people with Spanish last names that are classified as white and they try to argue? No, no, I'm I should be classified as Latino. Like, you know, that sort of thing like you could do something with that but That this author doesn't because she doesn't understand what she's talking about and here is the thing Here is the thing that makes this book series fall apart like on just a basic foundational level like it just completely fails to send the message it's sending in this world some races survive radiation better than others and That implies that some races actually are better than others Whoops That defeats the entire fucking purpose and then there's the whole mixed race thing like it's mentioned that Shen is half Asian and East Asian by that and it's no big deal other than He's apparently not supposed to be security because only full-blooded black people are supposed to be security But bramford just got him the job and like that's Okay, the thing is mixed race people Are implied to be very common here. We only ever really see shen but It's implied to be pretty common because like, you know, eden has a black boyfriend we'll see pretty quick and Other white people try to date black people a lot like it's it's not an unusual occurrence here And interracial marriage is not illegal or anything. So there's nothing discouraging people from doing it So there should be more of it And it should be an important part of their legal system and their society because like I said race defines everything in the setting apparently like In societies where race is super important being mixed race Is sometimes a very important category and it comes with its own unique challenges Like like I mentioned mestizo was a category created by the Spanish colonial system and they were a distinct legal category like they had their own rights and their own uh privileges and their own Restrictions on what they couldn't couldn't do like it was its own category that came with its own set of issues And in some places they've just outright measured it before Like in french caribbean colonies like Haiti They had specific legal definitions For everything from being half white and half black all the way down to One one hundred and twenty eighth black And like these all had their own names and their own uh legal rights again and things they couldn't couldn't do Like this could get complicated because imagine if someone who was like one eighth black Had a child with someone who was half black like You know the math starts getting kind of weird after a certain point and in the united states where mixed race People were less common back in the day You would be considered a colored person in some states if you were one eighth or one sixteenth non-white which Is kind of stupid Like to give you an idea of just how little one eighth is I would be considered japanese under that system Like it's just it's just a dumb way of doing things And the fact that this never comes up Is just one more way in which Voight just doesn't understand how any of this works Uh so back to the actual story Uh bramford calls in another security guard to talk to him for a minute And this guy's named jamal and Eden thinks about how he is secretly her boyfriend And she in her mind. She calls him my dark prince There's some more exposition we learned that bramford's father died in an attack by a pearl terrorist It's all the information we're given Uh But I guess it's a thing that happened and we also learn About an organization of black people who who vow to rid the world of white people And they apparently might be spying on this lab and trying to get information from them For some nefarious purpose. And so that's why bramford is talking to jamal He's like hey make sure everything is sealed up and you know that sort of thing And this group calls themselves the federation of free people. Are you Fucking kidding me if you're unaware In the united states in the 19th century There were organizations of black men who left slavery and they called themselves freed men's association maybe Maybe choose a name that doesn't sound like that. I mean you could have you could have gone with pretty much anything like you could have gone with the Dark power movement like that's stupid, but it's better or like the african people's union or something like Those would be kind of stupid and cringy, but it'd be better than this And what is the ffp's relationship with the government here? Like they're introduced as if there's some kind of violent radicals which have to hide their very existence But later we see them just walking around in public wearing their uniforms with no trouble If they're terrorists, isn't that kind of like wearing a shirt that says hello I'm a member of al qaeda that that's very strange And they also have their own hideouts and their own weapons and bombs and you know just stuff you would expect terrorists to have And it's mentioned later by members of the ffp that they want to overthrow the government So wouldn't the government know this and crack down on them? And for that matter are they really a small minority of violent extremists or do most of the people in this society agree with them because this society is extremely racist so Would they all agree with them? I don't know that's part of the problem here We don't know exactly how extreme they are considered by the standards of this world so We get like no dimension and no feeling for them or for what this world is like Or for why we should apparently be afraid of them So bramford realizes that if eden keeps working then there might be more trouble So he just sends her home. So everyone has time to cool down Sure, that makes sense and while she's walking home eden notices that her oxy levels are low and here is one of the strangest parts of this whole book and Well, who am I kidding? It barely breaks the top 10, but it is very weird Everyone in this world is constantly on oxycodone And I don't mean the people in this world use oxycodone a lot. I mean Literally everyone is literally always high on oxycodone We're on page 19 Victoria you cannot keep giving me all this shit to cover We have so much more to go over. You cannot keep doing this to me Her world banned voice gently warned her my dear your oxy levels are in the red zone The uni gov called oxy the happy drug Which seemed absurd since everyone knew happiness had gone the same way as the dolphins The full dose eden had taken that 18 should have kept her on an even keel throughout her 12 hour work shift But the extra stress had pushed her over the edge Already she felt the telltale dryness in her mouth, the jittery shakes and terrible cravings Earlier it was called a life band now it's called a world band I don't know why like if everyone is always on oxy. How does anything get done? Like it oxycodone Is an opioid painkiller. It's related to things like morphine and heroin and fentanyl Like it slows down your mind and your metabolic processes and when you take a lot of it it like Slows you down chills you out. Basically. That's that's what opioids do their depressants and they also Make you extremely constipated when you take too much of them which Might go some way to explaining why everyone in this world is such a kind But you know the thing is how would you get anything done if you're if everyone is constantly high? I don't understand like if everyone took some when they like got home after work and you know, so they were all still addicts then Sure, I could kind of buy that but The fact that they're always on it even at work is just Stupid It's just stupid. I don't understand. What does victoria foy think oxycodone is? And another thing about this is how do they grow enough poppies to make all this oxycodone? Like I assume they do all their farming underground with like ultraviolet lamps or something like I I could see how that would work out but Think about how much food they could grow Instead if they were not growing all these fucking poppies to make oxycodone because you would need a lot if everyone is constantly using it like There wouldn't even be a food shortage if that was the case I don't understand any of this So eden goes home and Despite the apparent lack of all these resources which has forced people to only have one child and yada yada She has a pet dog who's named austin and her own apartment Because you know, she's so horribly abused and oppressed Wish I could have my own fucking apartment So an officer visits her and not physically but like she projects a hologram tour and they start talking for a bit And she says that eden has six months to find herself a mate before she gets cut off from her food supply and her supply of oxy And possibly thrown outside. It is I don't know it goes back and forth It's not explained at all. Like maybe she gets thrown outside. Maybe she's just cut off from food, but The thing is we already knew all of this like just cut out that early exposition And we could have eden be worried but not know what she's worried about and then leave this scene here Like it would make things go faster, especially at the beginning when it just keeps interrupting us to talk about this other stuff And it would feel more natural like eden wouldn't need to think about. Oh, okay. Um, I I only got six months I gotta Get a dick in me before then or i'm dead But then we also get it said again here. Like it it's just weird. I don't like it And eden says that she would rather be dead than mate with a white person because she has them on her children to grow up with the same problems she's Had But she also feels that there's no one out there who would ever want such an horrible ugly white girl life is so hard Look Her mate rate is 15% Okay, and I don't know exactly what that means. Does that mean 15% of people want to date her or there's a 15% chance of For finding someone I I'm not totally sure but 15% is not 0% like there's there's someone out there for you Like even if you're not considered conventionally attractive by your society because again remember beauty standards do change based on time period and location There's someone out there who has a different type and would be into you You know, whether you're skinny or fat or pale or darker skinned or blonde or redhead or whatever Like there there's people out there who would be into you like people who are often considered ugly Still have relationships and get married and have children like that happens And then we got more fucking weird stuff about this world to cover. So eden's family at some point adopted emily dickinson as an ancestor and emily dickinson was a real person She was a poet Why Why would you adopt someone as an ancestor? Uh Like throughout the story eden thinks of a bunch of Poems by emily dickinson and uses them as like life advice or how to keep her resolved in tough times and stuff like that But she could just be a fan of her work You know, she could just say at some point. I really like emily dickinson because x and then you could still do the same thing like Adopting ancestors is just an odd thing to include Like if it's apparently common in this world Then we should see other people do it But we don't we only ever hear eden and her family doing it Like if other people did it It might still be odd But it would at least would at least add some dimension to this world because like, you know, everyone only has one child So families are just much smaller than they used to be and people want to think back and be like, oh, yes I'm related to a great scientist or a great conqueror or something like that like Okay, that could maybe add some dimension to it and hell Maybe it could even help make your point about racism, which remember that's what this book is about like if for example If some people some black people like in the ffp or something Adopted civil rights leader like nelson-mandela or martin luther king And they used them and their words to attack other races Like, you know, they used nelson-mandela's words of like freedom and equality and Decided to start talking about how he actually meant You should hate white people, you know, like perverting their words basically and rather than ending the discrimination they're just reversing it and That would maybe help show something like it would be a tricky minefield to navigate certainly like you would be Possibly uh saying or doing some extremely racist stuff. But I mean this book's already doing that But you know, it could maybe be done It's just I don't know. I see so many points in this book where I'm like, okay You could maybe have done something with that and then it just Shits the bed completely. So then eden's secret boyfriend jamal calls her and visits her over the hologram network thingy How's my little bunny? He said jamal. She said her sensors registering the warmth of his arms as they snaked around her Austin shot up growling. She had forgotten about him. It was embarrassing really As if she trained her dog to hate coals. Maybe he wasn't colorblind after all This is insane. Even the dog is racist in this world. This is absolutely fucking nuts. How does that? How does that even happen? They're colorblind. I don't understand. So Jamal and eden talk for a bit and he invites her to a moon dance Which is apparently just a thing where people go outside at nighttime So the radiation isn't too bad and they just party and attendance is mandatory Which is a little strange, but I mean, I guess it's like the government trying to keep people entertained so they don't overthrow them like bread and circuses, but They don't focus on it much and eden is happy because like now he's going to be publicly acknowledging their relationship and Again eden has gone to these moon dances before because they're mandatory, but earlier she said she'd never been outside Just plot hole after plot hole man like you need an editor victoria Even if you were a good writer, which you're not you would need an editor so eden heads out into the tunnels and walks to the train station and as she's walking through the tunnels she Thinks about how she's afraid that every black person she passes is going to hurt her And i'm not even going to touch that one We're just we're just moving right on past it because I just no we're not doing it What I will complain about is how there's no description of the tunnels whatsoever like How big are they are the floors made of rock or are they made of metal like how crowded are there They're just a couple of people walking around or are you pressed in with a big mass of bodies? What sort of things do you see when you walking around like do you see shops? Do you see graffiti on the walls? Do you see government propaganda being broadcast? Are there kids running around playing like these are the sorts of things you use to set the scene You know if it's an area where it's like super nice and brightly lit and there's a couple of plants hanging around Then that means it's probably a rich area or like a government Area or something like that But if it's run down and a bunch of the lights are broken So it's hard to see and there's rust everywhere Then that probably means the poorer area Like if we saw that when eden was walking through here Then that could tell us like okay. She lives in a really shitty area and she wants to escape which could give some Explanation as to why she's so desperate for a black boyfriend Or maybe it could just be like okay. This world is dying and the government is barely holding it together Like there's a lot you could do But we just get nothing. It's just she walks through the tunnels. There were some other people there Like that's all we get so while eden is on the train. She just randomly thinks back to her father's super secret experiment Apparently he is working on combining human and animal DNA in order to make us immune to radiation Or at least more resistant to radiation Now again, that's Stupid, but like Okay, I can work with some scientific inaccuracies in your science fiction dystopia story Well, I'm not even sure this story could really be considered science fiction But we'll get to that later like it just I can work with some of that But why reveal it now is the main thing Like later we see the experiment in action like we see it happen a little while after this And it would be more dramatic and surprising if we didn't know what it was And hell, maybe even eden could just not know what it is and she'd be surprised She'd be like, oh, that's what I was working on this whole time But like no they just come right out and tell us so we don't have a chance to wonder and Ponder and you know, you want to tease your audience you want to give them little hints So they start thinking about it themselves So while she's on the train, she meets two ffp soldiers just wearing their uniforms again Like they're supposed to be terrorists, but they're just announcing. Hello. I am a terrorist on the train And one of them is described as a blue black giant And the two soldiers come up to her and grab her and they act really creepy while they're doing so And Eden thinks back to a nursery rhyme that she heard when she was a child Little pearly whirly lost inside the mines tossed from coal to coal in fear she winds I'm sorry mother. He said he only wanted to see my white skin shine So in this world There's a children's nursery rhyme About a white girl getting kidnapped and gang raped by a bunch of black guys What the fuck what what the fuck So the two black guys who never actually get names Like never ever they they never okay. I guess we don't need to know that Uh drag her off to the moon dance at knife point And Eden tries to call out for jamal, but he's not there even though he's supposed to be there and They she just doesn't know where he went and she can't find him anywhere And they start dancing in the middle of the crowd, you know, everyone is going crazy and No one seems to question that she's at knife point like Maybe you could have thrown in a line about how people don't notice that sort of thing in crowds or Maybe they're all on hallucinogens or something so they're not going to notice but okay, whatever And they start dancing with the crowd the two guys are Essentially they're sexually assaulting Eden, you know, they're touching her all over her body kissing her without permission That sort of thing And this might have been a tense scene where i'm thinking. Oh god. I hope she gets out. I hope she's okay If I didn't just hate eden You know, that's the problem. I just I just hate her too much like it's it's not going to work as a tense scene And jamal never shows up. Uh, she keeps hoping that he'll Rescue her but he doesn't and we'll get back to that in a minute And then bramford arrives and he shoots at the two men and then they just run off And eden takes this time to get very annoyed with bramford and thinking about how he saved her life because he thinks that he owns her Very grateful eden so bramford takes her to his private hovercraft Which is piloted by the only latino person in this entire series and they don't get a name so You know, I I guess that's worth mentioning and Actually now that i'm thinking about it the only asian person is shen and he's half asian And I guess they've mentioned his mother briefly But she's never actually in the story. So this story has one latino person one half asian person and everyone else is either black or white Or indian, but they don't really come up until later and so We just kind of miss out on the way that race relations aren't just Two ways like there's multiple different groups of people out there Even in this world that you created while she's on the hovercraft eden watches a video of an albino being killed by an angry mob That serves no purpose other than saying that people hate albinos, but we are we already know that so it's not really a Big deal. I'm also not sure why she would be watching it at this time period And we find out that a fire broke out at their laboratory So they fly back and bramford prepares to undergo the procedure to become part animal Apparently it's risky because they haven't tested it before but he wants to do it And then when they're at the lab And they're talking about this eden gets a call from jamal and then she sneaks away to find him so In other words this guy who abandoned her And let her get kidnapped and sexually assaulted by two strangers Is apparently better and more trustworthy than the guy who saved her life This bitch has two functioning brain cells and they are both fighting for third place So she finds jamal and he's wearing an ffp uniform And he's with a bunch of other ffp soldiers And some of the other security guards from the lab are also apparently ffp soldiers And then the two guys from earlier arrive and jamal gives a short evil speech which I don't care enough to read it. I'm sure you're all very upset with me for skipping over it It's not interesting. Trust me. And in his evil speech He announces that he wants to take control of the human animal hybrid technology And use it to overthrow the government so that they can wipe out all the white people And this is dumb. The tech hasn't even been tested yet Like he doesn't even know if it works It wouldn't it make sense to wait until after the scientists are done putting it together Before you attack and reveal yourself because like What if you attack now and take all their data and then find out like oh, okay, it doesn't actually work Like what are you going to do then? You don't have any scientists of your own that we know of And I mean he just tells all this to eden as well because I guess we need a villain and the villain needs an evil speech or something I don't know and anyways while they're Marching her way at gunpoint Eden activates the lab's self-destruct sequence with a passcode Because yeah, a self-destruct passcode is the sort of thing you give to a low-level lab technician Like even though she got it from her father who's the head scientist It doesn't make any sense for him to give it to her. It's just I hate to keep repeating myself, but just saying it's just weird or it's just dumb Is sometimes the best thing for a lot of the stuff that happens in this fucking book So the fighting breaks out between Bramford and some security guards and the ffp And bramford transforms into a half panther man So he gets bigger and he has claws and fangs and stuff And he's strong enough that he can fight off the ffp even though they have guns And he realizes okay, this lab's about to self-destruct so they all hop in his hovercraft and fly off before it blows up And in the hovercraft at this stage we have bramford eden her father Austin who was her dog remember and a flight attendant named daisy who is also a white person And the latino pilot from earlier is just gone He he just isn't there anymore and he's never mentioned again I guess and then they get chased by the government for a bit and It's a very tense and thrilling action scene. Let me tell you Like it's so dangerous that eden has time to get horny in the middle of it eden found her body tilting towards his Maybe it was illogical for a pearl to be drawn to such a dangerous creature, but she wanted to touch him Eden is a furry confirmed. I guess Now like I said, this is the opening act of the story done like from this point forward things Are much different and uh it's not doesn't take place in the tunnels And after this like I said, there is much less racism It's there and we'll talk about it when it comes up, but we are past the worst of it And let me tell you it doesn't improve the book at all Like I am almost halfway through my notes right now and that's just the first Uh little over 70 pages of the first book Like we still have all of this to go and then we still have All of this to go But like I said the biggest flaw with both of them is just that it's fucking boring So eden's father is injured and they can't treat him and eden's immediate first thought is to give up bramford to the government to save themselves He saved your life multiple times tonight you fucking bitch God I I hate eden so much like like like I said the the part where she just straight up says she hates black people Is where I realized okay, there's no coming back for that from this But there's so many other points where she just hammers home what a fucking terrible person she is So they tell her that jamal was dating her so that he could use her for information And like he could get information about the lab and what sort of experiments are going on Which might have made sense if he didn't work at the fucking lab. He's a security guard, man Like he already has access to all this shit. He can talk to people he can And it's not like eden was a head scientist or anything. She was a fucking lab technician So it's not like she would know that much more than the other people there There's so much There's so many unnecessary parts of this plan And while they're talking bramford realizes, hey, we can't trust this bitch She's gonna give us up. She's gonna do something stupid. So he takes her life band so she can't contact anyone She freaks out a little bit, but she's unable to overpower him and they fly off to somewhere called Sector six The government apparently has no control over this area. There are drug lords and stuff And that's it. That's that's all we learn Well, we don't even know where on earth this area is We just know It's somewhere and it also contradicts itself later And there's also sector six is just rainforest like it's full of rainforest Which I mean again, this is a rather small scientific inaccuracy, but it bears mentioning If there was that much solar radiation that it was killing humans Rainforests would be one of the first places to go not the last and I mean Maybe you could mention like this area got shielded by the mountains or something, but they they don't it's just like Yeah, this one little patch of rainforest is still there But the government hasn't gone in and taken over and used it for something So they land somewhere in the jungle and they walk outside and they force eden outside And she freaks out for a little bit because there's sunlight and she's like sunlight will kill you Obviously eden thought her aunt had an experience this bottomless terror whenever the golden light had stretched its arms towards her Hey, that's actually kind of a good line Don't know what it's doing in this book, but you know it it actually shows How someone could be so terrified of something that seems so innocuous to us sunlight, you know It's like actually a good line. That's weird. I also want to mention that Just the part from them getting on the hovercraft to them Landing and all the conversation I mentioned before where there wasn't really that much That's almost 30 pages Just throwing that out there. So right away. They run into an indian tribe called the Huaorani, I hope I'm pronouncing that right and the Huaorani are a real tribe actually they live in Ecuador And they're super primitive. They still live in like Thatched roof huts and They don't have any modern weaponry or technology or anything But somehow they survived out here without being in the tunnels And like I said earlier, I how would they fit into this racial caste system? Because they were never mentioned earlier And the government must know about them like there must be at least some Indians who Went into the tunnels at some point Like where would they where would they fit? I just I don't know you could have said something with that and I may as well say this now There are Aztecs nearby Like Aztecs live very close to the Huaorani like within walking distance Here's the thing like I said the Huaorani Are from Ecuador the Aztecs were from Mexico Which is on a different continent Indigenous tribes are not all the same Victoria They're very different. They're very distinct from one another the Huaorani also Seemed to worship Bramford because he looks like an Aztec jaguar god Even though again, they're not Aztecs so they shouldn't be worshiping the Aztec pantheon In spite of her disgust Eden's eyes riveted on his broad dark chest that gleamed in the sunlight Even the molecules of air seemed to fall away from his powerful physique Maybe he did deserve to be worshiped. She admitted I don't know what to add to that But I will say that worshiped is spelled wrong. So Daisy hands them some supplies and flies off with the hovercraft like Flies off. She's gone and they're all just in the jungle now But she also puts Eden's life band in her pack secretly without telling anybody and I'm gonna be straight up most of the rest of the book revolves around Eden trying to get her life band back So Bramford already knows the Huaorani I guess he came up here and spoke with them before and has lived amongst them a little bit again He's 22. He shouldn't have all this life experience And they just start to hike off into the jungle To the Huaorani's home village and Eden worries about getting cancer from the sunlight and I'm It doesn't happen that fast You know if the radiation was really that bad that it would give you cancer right away. It would kill you pretty quick But if it's just the cancer you need to worry about then that would take weeks to develop at least But okay, sure Whatever just moving past that Eden has a phobia of the sunlight. So they reach the Huaorani village And it's mentioned that Eden is afraid of the water because it'll wash off her black face Yeah, a lot of you probably forgot she's been wearing blackface this whole fucking time even though I mentioned it before She's been wearing it this whole time And She tries to use her mind powers to manifest the life band into our backpack Etc, you know, that sort of thing. I'm not explaining that. I'm just I'm just not So later when she gets by herself She manages to pull the band out of the backpack and before she can use it to contact anyone A monkey steals it Runs off into the jungle Then she tries to run off after the monkey and get it back and she falls into a river And this washes off her black face. So the rest of the story she's not wearing it Bramford saves her life and Now she's white again. So I guess everything is Terrible again And at this point the story basically vanishes You know, I I guess it really vanishes as soon as they land in the jungle But like there's just There's nothing happening like Eden tries to get the life band back She gets super horny over bramford because she's a furry And that's pretty much it for a very long time Eden also never experiences any sort of withdrawals despite going cold turkey on oxycodone Those of you who have gone cold turkey on opioids before Please tell the others how difficult and unpleasant that would be Please tell them like it's mentioned briefly Like bramford hands her some berries and says here eat these it'll ward off the effects of your detox or something But I don't think berries work that way Eden also just goes back and forth and back and forth between hating bramford and loving him Like literally from one paragraph to the next her mind will change. She'll think about bramford is an awful person I hate him so much. I cannot wait to get away from here and have him arrested to god He's so horny or he's so hot and so sweet and god. I just want him like I'm tired Bramford sunk his weight into a crouch and directed his rage at her Eden's knees wobbled the name had struck a nerve in him. If she said it again, he might make her pay He might grab her with those big rough hands and pin her down just imagine that for over a hundred pages So in the midst of all this they mentioned somebody named rebecca multiple times and each time they mention her bramford just gets mad and changes the subject and especially with eden he tells her don't talk about rebecca blah blah blah And eventually much later we learn that she was his ex-wife who was white and actually looked a lot like eden She also had blonde hair blue eyes And she was killed by the ffp like there. I just I just saved you several hours of reading right there And we also learn at this time that there's a plant that the natives eat which prevents them from dying from radiation Like the plant has miraculous healing properties and it they just chew it and it prevents them from getting cancer like Sure, we'll we'll just go with that. We'll just accept that. We'll just accept it. Sure We also learn that bramford's transformation was apparently not complete And for eden's father to complete it He needs some more dna from the various animals that were Implanted in him because he wasn't just mixed with panthers He was mixed with you know jaguars pythons and a couple other things So they need samples of their dna in order to complete this And I just a lot of this weaves in and out in a weird order I'm just doing it one at a time to help avoid confusion So eden gets attacked by a python and bramford actually saves her life Not sure why but he saves her life And finally from this point forward she does stop hating him What else did she need in life besides the warmth of his body next to hers? She was done with regrets from now on she would follow her heart In fact, she would forgive the past and start fresh with ronson bramford eden licked tiny beads of water that clung to the hairs on his chest with the tip of her tongue His full-throated rumbling sounded full of yearning You know all this sexual stuff between eden and bramford Has caused me to think about something and that's that cats have barbed penises So does bramford have a barbed penis? I had to wonder and now so do you So during the fight with the python they both get wounded So they just have to chill out for a few days while they heal and they can't Trek back to the village even though they're right near the village It seems like it would be better to be over there while you're healing but whatever So bramford decides to go on like a spirit journey because spirit journeys are a thing now and like shamans Are a thing now and he just ingests some sort of hallucinogenic plant And goes on this journey while eden is there watching him And this lasts about five chapters That is not an exaggeration five Shitting mcdick cock chapters. He's just sitting there hallucinating And eden's just watching and that's it and I don't know later. He tells the story of a shaman which Just just just listen only the shaman drank the beheko de oro in the special ceremonies long ago It allowed him to see far ahead so he could protect the people They called him el tigre because his spirit flew with the speed of a jaguar That line does not make me wish I was dead That line makes me wish I was never alive to begin with We called him the tiger because he moved like a jaguar like What? If he moves like a jaguar just call him el jaguar That's the spanish name for jaguar now I learned that apparently in latin america or these parts of it People do often refer to all big cats as jaguars. So lions tigers. Also, it's like there's all jaguars, which Okay, fine. It's not as stupid as it sounds at first, but If you're going to do that at least throwing a line about it Like throwing a single line where eden's like wait, why would they call him that if he was a jaguar? Oh, they just call all big cats jaguars, you know, that's just their thing like you could do that it wouldn't be that difficult and That right there is just a microcosm of everything wrong with this book Like there's just no effort put in at any stage and no thinking put in at any stage So while he's hallucinating, he's talking about to eden how it's like she loves her or he loves her and blah blah blah And then he calls her rebecca at some point and she realizes Oh, he's not actually talking to me. He thinks he's talking to his ex-wife Go ahead eden thought rip my body apart. My heart is already in pieces Can you please just dive aids? Does anybody have aids who they could put their dick in her face and get her started on that? So later bramford goes on a rant about how people wrecked the environment and that's the way Why the world is the way it is and it's never specified how radiation got so bad like Losing the ozone layer would be bad, but it wouldn't do this it wouldn't get this awful like If it was just a plot device if it was just like, yeah, the world is covered in solar radiation now like Okay, fine. I can work with that. I can just Not think about it too hard and Excuse me go through with it and I could bring it up as a as a flaw, but It wouldn't bother me that much, but now that you're bringing it up I have to think about it and think like how could humans possibly have done this Is this about racism or is it about the environment? I just I don't know. Maybe it's supposed to be about both Maybe I don't know I like I said there was no thinking put in So eden decides that she wants to be an animal hybrid as well She wants to transform into a furry the same way that bramford did and she said she refers to it as wanting to become a she-cat Which is just a stupid name Like I don't have anything else to add. It's just a stupid name God you you have no idea how much time I am skipping like all of this is so fucking stretched out. It is absolutely ridiculous So while all this is going on She also learns that logan there that bramford has a son who is named logan like him and rebecca had a son And logan stays in a shack 24 7 and he never comes out Like not during the daytime not at night time just never he stays there all the time and eden tries to coax him out And at this stage there is a stretch of about seven pages where I made no notes at all Which tells me that this part of the book is almost Tolerable now eventually she lures logan out and she sees that he is a cotton which is you know an albino person it turns out bramford and rebecca both carried the gene and bramford is super ashamed of it and that's why he has a son hidden up here So no one will kill him and he also wants to transform logan into a cat man as well so that He can survive and actually go outside And that's like The one moment in this entire book where a character has like believable motivations for all the weird shit they do How could bramford have produced such a child? The albinism gene had been all but wiped out at least according to the unigov's proclamation True they found the occasional albino and murdered the poor thing eden shuttered at the ghastly fate logan had escaped The albinos are all extinct except for the ones that are still alive like do Do you hear yourself think? We still have 50 pages of the shit left. I hope you're aware of that So eden's dad is still really sick and wounded and i'm i'm so concerned about him etc And so eden and bramford go off into the mountains to get more of the magic plant that heals people to heal her dad and You'd think that there would just be plants nearby because this is where the hawawarani live and they Actually eat it regularly so you think they would grow it or it would just grow wildly nearby But I guess they have to go on a long trek and here's the thing I think that if this had been the plot it might have been fine You know, it's it's an adventure with a clear goal Like they have to hike through the jungles and the mountains through all kinds of danger in order to get this Miraculous plant and bring it back to save her dad's life. Like it's an adventure with a clear goal There are characters who I mean even if you wanted to stick with the racism aspect like one of them could be black and one could be white And they could dislike each other at first but have to work together And then they could bond over the course of the story and you could even skip over all that FFP stuff at the beginning and all the terrorism stuff and the stuff about the evil governments Like this might have been a perfectly fine story, but I don't know why I'm trying to make this better It is just not worth the effort, but I don't know it doesn't really work here because it only lasts like two chapters So it just doesn't have time to sink in you know, know the events that happen have any time to Have any emotional impact It's also weird. I mentioned this a little bit earlier But it's weird that the government never took over this area Or explored it like, you know, they never looked around to see if there was anything useful in this area because they're like Well, everything here survived the radiation, you know, the plants and animals So maybe we should look into that but I guess they'd just rather hang out underground so They find the plant and then there's some Aztecs nearby who they just say hello to and That's it. They don't get into a fight or anything. They just sort of Say hello And there are some Aztec ruins nearby which is weird that they're ruins because the Aztecs still live there But whatever and allegedly those ruins are thousands of years old The thing is the Aztec empire didn't exist until 1428 Which makes me wonder how far in the future is this like if this is 200 years from today Then the Aztec ruins would be only about 800 years old So it's not thousands, but if it's many thousands of years in the future I have to wonder like, okay, how is their technology not better? And Like just I don't know anything about this world other than stupid shit. Like I don't know how old it is You're you're opening yourself up to so many questions and so much fucking criticism So they get back to the village. They give Eden's father the plant She decides she cannot live without Bramford Okay, sure. Uh, so she finally she finally gets her life banned back and she just sends a message to Shen I didn't actually write why she sent a message or what she said But She sent it Now the thing is she was warned not to send out any messages at all because they could be traced back to her But she just straight up tells Shen where they are Like she tells him. Yep. We're we're here like come on and get us And Bramford finds out about this and he's pissed so he locks her in a prison cell because he's afraid his animal instincts will take over I I guess they have animal instincts. I just I don't know that That part of the story is not really explored or explained. So I just I haven't been talking about it And he has to run off into the jungle to make sure he doesn't hurt anybody and he doesn't want her to follow him Okay, sure. And so the next day after this happened Jamal and the ffp arrived to take the village hostage because Eden told them exactly where they were And more than that the two men who kidnapped and sexually assaulted Eden earlier Take her out of the cell and into the middle of the village where they have everybody gathered up and they have them at gunpoint Yum hurly giant said grabbing her Yeah, I'm not talking about that one. I just I just wanted to let you all know that it exists And it is kind of weird to me because there's only one guy with a gun that's holding the entire village hostage and I have to wonder Why don't the Hualrani have any guns or any modern technology? Like Sure, you could say most of it was lost or destroyed During the apocalypse, but they should have been able to preserve a little bit or scavenge a little bit Like it's just Trying to make them seem more primitive. I guess which is a whole other can of worms But I think I've just talked enough about racism for now So we're not getting into that and they also mentioned that there's an ffp member there Who is half white and he's also only 13 years old And Eden takes time to wonder why he was let into the ffp And I agree with her. That's very strange. That's like meeting a half black clansman And this question is never answered It's never even really brought up again. It's just not not even close. They just sort of Mention it once and then it's gone. Like the sort of thing isn't impossible Like, you know in real life, there was a guy named Jackie Arclough who was a half black neo-nazi Like trust me. I don't have time to get into that but you can look it up yourself. It's weird But yeah, that that's it. Like it's not impossible that a half black dude would or a half white dude would join up with this organization, but it is very strange and You should spend some time on that maybe Maybe just a little I don't know So some Aztecs pop out of the jungle and shoot darts into the soldiers and it kills several of them And then Jamal panics and starts taking hostages and then all hell breaks loose and he shoots the dog Jamal struggled to lift the dog off of him. Just then Logan made a heartbreaking sound No, son, Bramford called the boy brought squeaky's machete down onto Jamal's chest with a sickening thump The wool did leader fell back his death rattle filling the stunned silence First I want to accuse Victoria Foyte of using the shoot the dog moment to make him seem more evil But honestly that makes me like him a bit more because the dog was racist and Also, there's a typo. Like I said, there's typos in here and some of you might be wondering like wait This is published by an actual publisher. It's not self published. It was published by sand dollar press So why are there spelling errors? Shouldn't they have an editor on hand? And well, I looked into that a little it turns out sand dollar press is actually owned by Victoria Foyte So like she created her own company to publish her books, which I mean, that's technically not self publishing, but it's pretty fucking close It's also apparently a corporation which is weird because you think it would be an LLC, but that's a tangent So yeah, during this whole climax with all this postage taking and this fighting Eden does nothing Like she stands there and yells and worries about people But she doesn't actually do anything to help or contribute despite being the protagonist And this whole climax is less than 20 pages. So Yeah, we have all this build up and I mean like the whole climax from the moment that The ffp arrives in the village to them all being killed like We don't have any time for any of this to sink in And then later after the dust has cleared It also felt good to be of use to the huarani who had given her so much Now that their location had been discovered. They needed to relocate Guess what? You're a bitch Fuck you bitch. This is your fault. You're the one that told them where they were or told the ffp where they were like You're the reason they have to pack up and leave the their homes that they lived in presumably for their whole lives like That's the thing about eden on page two. She gives all the reason in the world to hate her She has nowhere to go but up but she insists on digging deeper at every turn just So anyways the book ends right after that eden is planning on turning into a cat person and she loves bramford and Oh, it was that terrible Just in every goddamn way. It was terrible like a world in which there's horrible racism But it is against And put some dramatic music here white people Oh, that's the worst dystopia they can think of like Everyone is mean to white people except for a few people and then you die if you go outside And that's pretty much it which is just Not how racism works like there's a lot more stuff to it than that and it's a lot more unpleasant than that Like here's a list of things that various racial groups have had to deal with at some point or another all over the world That are never brought up here Being unable to vote slash participate in government slavery having toxic waste dumped near their homes Being more likely to be harassed slash brutalized by police being followed around the store by security Having cops called on you while minding your own business suffering harsh harsh repensities from the justice system when convicted of a crime Not being allowed to live in certain neighborhoods being unable to marry someone of another race and forced relocation That's not a complete list. That's just some stuff that If you could have brought up any of them It would have made this book a bit better or at the very least it would have made it more grounded in reality Like victoria foy did zero research and just kind of assumed she already knew everything that she needed to know And then she wrote in furry sex like I don't know just there's another series with a similar concept, which I read a little bit of called knots and crosses and Like I said, I only read a little but it is so much better at a similar concept. Like it's a world where uh in history africa colonized europe and Took that over and then it was decolonized and then so you have a bunch of The world the social order is basically flipped, you know black people are largely wealthier and in charge compared to white people And so racism against white people is prevalent And it's better for Let's be honest. It's partially better just because it was written by a black person who knows a bit more about what they're talking about And it only changes the social fabric of the world. That's the important part Like it changes society, but humans themselves and the environment are the same Save the pearls changes the world to make racial differences seem as if they're scientific and biologically ingrained in a way which they're not Like I said earlier if radiation is that bad being black is not going to make much of a difference but apparently it does here and Despite how much the system sucks the system of segregation How much it sucks? Eden just kind of ignores it after a while Like that's the thing that makes this book fail more than anything else Like it's supposedly about how awful this system is and how awful racism and discrimination are But the characters never really do anything to fight against it really Like they're they're fighting against the ffp, but the ffp aren't the government I don't think at least it's again. It's stupid and not made clear Like eden just wants to leave and turn into a she-cat Like that's her goal by the end And even before that she just wants to find a black boyfriend. She doesn't want to fix anything and here's another detail which I probably wouldn't have noticed in any other book like I probably wouldn't have noticed it and if I did notice it I probably wouldn't bring it up here because I figured it would have been coincidence, but Did you notice how in this book The black people who are nice have names like ronson and peaches But the black people who are evil and mean to eden have names like ashina and jamal jesus christ now like I said foight defended herself in Not a not a very good way, but one of the things she said to defend herself was that She claimed a black person read her book and talked to her at a convention and told her that she liked it I guess it's nice to have confirmation that Candice Owens can read But I don't think she speaks for the entire black community If hitler just wanted to make germany great and have things run well, okay fine The problem is is that he wanted he had dreams outside of germany This whole thing just feels like it was written a hundred years ago by someone who Wanted to help but was still delusional and had some very interesting ideas about race and how it works And uh, I don't know that's about all I have to say about the first book So uh, let's continue to engage in literary self-harm by going to save the pearl's part to Adapting eden now on the cover. This one says it's the sequel to the award-winning novel Revealing eden and I didn't believe that at first, but I looked into it and apparently it's true Yeah, the the first book won the eric hoffer best young adult book award And the eric hoffer award seems to be like a legit award You know, it's not something that just Like it's an actual award. It's not something she just made up And I don't know what they were thinking At all And then the back of the book has some positive reviews of the first one Including from like the san francisco book review the midwest book review the huffington post and like I I do not know why these reviewers gave this book Any praise at all like its flaws are pretty obvious. It's not like A lot of these issues are just like specific little grievances that bother me personally Like there's some pretty serious problems here just looking at like plot and character and all that But the weirdest one of this is that One of the positive quotes comes from maryon williamson Y'all remember maryon williamson? Like she's probably most famous because she tried to run for president in 2020 And she started talking about how her opponents were hark harnessing dark psychic energy and she's talking about orbs and shit like She was weird And I feel the need to bring up that she apparently liked the first book in this series And then this book is basically just a continuation of eden's Well, I was gonna say journey, but I don't think that's the right word From atop an aztec pyramid the last of its kind among the ruins of earth Who eat silo pochly looked out over a hidden pocket where a small tribe of aztec people lived Long ago they had escaped the vengeful arm of the spanish conquistadors and taken refuge here If not for the discovery of a miraculous healing plant, they would have died So i'm not going to go into a lot of detail here, but basically Aztec gods are confirmed as real in this world And also apparently victoria foight learned that oh ecuador and mexico are different places So like I guess the aztecs just Some of them fled from the conquistadors and hid out in the jungle for hundreds of years afterwards But like it's on a different continent. It's not like it's just a hop skip away, but Okay, sure, but like let's focus on the aztec gods being real That raises literally dozens of questions about this world and how it works And the nature of this planet and I'm just I'm going to ignore all those questions because I already know None of this was thought through It's also a little bit weird that these are like the only aztecs left because And they still kind of exist in real life Like you know their entire culture and everything with and their religion with human sacrifice that doesn't exist anymore But like they still have descendants and a lot of those descendants still speak nahuatl Which was the language of the aztec or rather it was the language of the mishika tribe who were In charge of the aztec empire, but it's a Let's not even get into all that like they didn't call themselves aztecs And so basically uh in this prologue Huitzilopochtli talks about how eden is their only hope It's it's nice To have characters just come out and reassure the audience that the protagonist is the coolest bestest most special person of all time That's important to know So eden and bramford are just hanging out in the jungle just just kind of hanging out Not really doing anything else not Just just hanging out in the jungle And victoria foite spends a couple of sentences repeating her argument from her blog that i mentioned earlier that coal is not a slur because coals can Coal can be burned for fuel It wasn't great then it's not great now They also mentioned that eden's genetics are inferior, but bramford loves her anyways And I I mean I already kind of brought this up But like this series implies or in this case just outright states That some races are better than others like It defeats its own argument at every turn And even then like this world has genetic engineering Right like I imagine it would be much easier to just alter humans than it would be to change them into human animal hybrids So Why not just get rid of the bad genes? You know why not just make it so that there aren't any white people or asian people or latino people or anything like they're they're just all black like Jesus this book is so bad. It's making me advocate for eugenics because that's somehow better than what it is They're doing here I don't know this whole section of the book is really just bramford and eden swooning over each other Bramford swept his hand over her face pushing back her long golden hair His emerald eyes pulled her to him like magnetic beams I'm starting to doubt that victoria foight has ever read a book before So they run off into the jungle and they run into some aztec warriors who are wearing jaguar pelts And eden spends an entire paragraph thinking that they're jaguars standing on their hind legs It I guess it's not the craziest thing to believe in this world But it's still stupid like you could have just spent A sentence saying she for a moment She thought they were jaguars standing on their hind legs then she realized they were people You know It makes her seem dumb when you don't do that So the Aztecs also all talk in spanish, too Which is a little weird you'd think they would Speak nahuatl And later it's mentioned that they do speak nahuatl. So why are they speaking spanish in this case? I don't know. Uh, it's also mentioned that eden apparently understands spanish because she used to listen to it on her life band a lot which Again, not the craziest thing like it's future technology. You just hear the translations a lot like okay She has some exposure to the language. I'll accept that but it's something you should have brought up earlier They talk about how the hua rani needs to pack up and leave before the ffp come back We already knew that you don't need to repeat it But okay, and so while everyone is packing up We are introduced to kevin or we're properly introduced to kevin Who is the half black ffp member who i mentioned from before? She turned to find kevin rounding the dirt path that led from the laboratory Half ahead taller than she and gangly his cafe au lau skin branded him as mixed breed half coal half pearl Earlier he was 13 now. He's 14 Despite this being like two days later And also more food for skin tone. It's just it's just cringe. So kevin is just suddenly an important character in this book like apparently he was Spared in the battle at the end of book one which is not mentioned before now It's just like eden sees in that one time and then he's forgotten about the rest of the book and then he comes back here and eden just sees him as a younger brother for some reason you know like Okay, it's fine to introduce new characters But if you want us to believe that they have formed some sort of relationship with the old characters who we already know and know then You have to actually show them bonding a little bit. Like you have to show us that you have to do something, please But you just you don't do that here. We we know nothing about their relationship. But apparently she sees him as a brother bramford and eden's dad both claim that they need to keep the technology a secret At least for the time being because if it gets out and the government gets it It'll inevitably lead to a war and all the white people will be killed I have several things to say about that First of all, uh, not everyone would want to transform into a furry Like some people would rather stay underground given the choice Like like some people would take it. Some people would be fine being animals and being able to Run about in the sunlight and stuff. But a lot of people would probably be happier being human underground and After that wouldn't the government and ffp have less reasons to kill white people if they were no longer the Inferior race like if they're all just human animal hybrids now like Wouldn't when they just not have inferior races now I know some of you are probably thinking we're like racism isn't based in logic They would still hold their old hatreds and you're correct But this book series tries to claim that racism is based in logic That it has that whole thing about how white people die easier from radiation So if their reasons for feeling all this hate are like rational and logical They shouldn't be upset at this. They should they should be less upset at least And this is the problem with a lot of fantasy and sci-fi series that try to Talk about racism by using like aliens or different species or something Like it always says that racism is bad. Yes, but then it gives the bigoted group a real reason to feel the way that they feel like a good example of this From recent years would be the Eldians from Attack on Titan and I'm not going to spoil the ending. Don't worry, but The Eldians can turn into these giant zombie things that like to eat humans and They can also summon an army of colossal titans Which can kill everyone on earth like they have that capability So it kind of makes sense that other people would want to genocide them because like that's removing a threat to their own existence like There's an argument to be made there that genocide is okay And in real life, that's what all genocides are founded on You know the idea that this other group is somehow a threat to you just by existing like The idea that this whole ethnic group or whole religion or something is a threat to you just by existing and Attack on Titan just straight up says like yes, this this actually makes sense. Here is a scenario where that is true and I mean issues with the ending of Attack on Titan aside That was at least consistent with it, you know, and There was other good stuff to enjoy in that series and just yada yada, but this is not consistent This is trying to act like racism is logical and rational and then it's treating it as though it isn't like which is And again, wouldn't it be easier to just modify humans so that they're immune to radiation while still staying humans And not being furries like I mean it's a smaller change so that makes sense to me. I'm not a geneticist But it makes sense to me like maybe the characters could give some sort of pseudoscientific explanation Which would explain that Which and if they did they'd be fine, but they don't offer anything. They just kind of ignore it So they take the magic plants from earlier and they decide to call them Newman's cure Which is fucking stupid because Newman or Eden and her father's last name is Newman, by the way, just in case you forgot Because all this riveting stuff just Okay, so they call it Newman's cure Even though they didn't fucking discover it like name it after the natives or something would make more sense But I suppose that is just par for the course. So anyways, uh, this Newman's cure plant has made Eden's father healthier and he's moving around better than he had before I know I keep calling him Eden's father, but I don't think we ever learn his name. He's just Eden's father So that's what I gotta call him. And anyways, he's moving around better than he did before And Eden for some reason thinks this is suspicious Um We have no reason to believe this is suspicious. We already know this plant is basically magic But okay, and we also learned that he speaks Nahuaudal for some reason so he can talk to the Aztecs like Like he's not a linguist or anything. He just Says at some point that he Reconstructed the Nahuaudal language and now he can speak it Just just use a translator or something, you know, you have all this sci-fi technology You can just say okay the life band acted as a translator between English and Nahuaudal like just just say that I would accept that more than this Uh, so they talk about how the Aztecs believe that the world ended Because there was a lack of spiritual balance And I don't know if this is really how Aztec theology and cosmology worked Uh, and I don't care enough to check. I feel like Victoria Foy didn't check either So it's possible we're both wrong here But my understanding is that the Aztecs believed they needed to keep the gods fed with human sacrifices And if they didn't the world would end which Like okay, that seems silly to us nowadays But like if you genuinely believe that the world will end if you don't Commit a human sacrifice then It Well, it's hard to blame people for that, but apparently yeah, these new Aztecs Don't believe that they just believe that the world needs spiritual balance and Their gods are still around so they obviously didn't starve And they still sacrifice people in tiny numbers like I said So why would Changing anything why would sacrificing more or doing anything change anything? It's not I hate to repeat myself. It's just it's not explained at all and I genuinely don't understand this plot point in the slightest It's just like yes, we need spiritual balance. How are you going to achieve spiritual balance? Like we're gonna bring in some furries and So they go off on their journey to the Aztec home Where hopefully they and the huarani will be able to live and maybe save the world And this journey takes a very long time and they run into no obstacles along the way which would make it interesting like Eden and bramford have a ton of hot make-out sessions with each other while they sneak away from others. So That makes me wonder if his tongue is barbed You know because cats also have like those sharp little barbs on their tongue. So it sticks to stuff and now i'm wondering like Is his I don't know It's so strange to me that they have all this potentially neat stuff going on You know, you have Aztec gods that they're trying to save the world with They have racial violence. They have terrorists. They have an evil government They have an unlivable planet that is dying even more by the day And they just decide to focus on this weird romance and even then that romance sucks like Just why are they in love? I can't think of a single reason why they're in love Eden just decides that she loves him more than she can bear at some point. I just I don't understand. She distrusts him and then she thinks he hates her for being white Then she thinks that he hates he brought her out to the jungle and then at someone indeterminate part she I have a headache there's not even any effort put in here like just Okay, uh, so her and bramford just decide they're gonna get married which As apparently rare in this world Like people usually just make the ones and then part ways which is a little odd But okay, whatever. I'll work with it. So they finally reach the Aztec home and they go to the pyramid and they meet wheat silo pochley and Then they just kind of take for granted that he's a god Like they say hey, this is which H i'ma call him H. This is H. He's a god and they just kind of go like wow, he seems like a god I guess he's a god and like Yeah, you don't need any proof to Find out about this sort of thing, but okay. Sure. We'll just move past that and It turns out that H believes that bramford is a jaguar god and that him being here will help them bring spiritual balance to the world Again, I don't understand how or why but it's it's a thing that they believe They also believe that eden needs to transition to a cat person so that the balance can be complete And you know what you were not expecting this Okay, I when we started on this journey together and I told you that this was just racist hunger games You were not expecting human animal hybrids and Aztec gods to enter into the equation. You just This has gone so off the goddamn rails So two women show up at the pyramid and we later learned that their that their names are mesli and yolotli From their proud bearing even guessed that they belonged to the noble class probably mother and daughter The girl must have been about 14 or 15 Her pert breasts jutted against her sleeveless saffron colored blouse which set off her warm brown skin Why are you talking about a 14 year old girl's breasts? Why So eden goes with them and she's supposed to stay with them until the wedding happens. I'm Not sure why she's supposed to stay with them until the wedding happens, but okay. She just goes with it and Through several pages of painful attempts at communication, which Like they could have brought a translator like either a person or an electronic one, but okay Uh through several pages of attempts at communication. They tell her that she is or she's supposed to become Shochipili who is the goddess of love Eden smiled how lucky to be with people who worshiped love That was so cringe. I just made a black hole in my fucking face So eden stays with them for several weeks And during this time, I guess she becomes friends with yoloakley. I mean it We don't see much of it happening, but uh, they're they're great friends. Let me tell you and I mean what little we do see is awful Yolo pointed to the quarter moon soft and pale in a corner of the sky like a parentheses to the day Mesley she said eden got it your mother's name means moon Mine was called lily. It used to be a common flower her chest tightened as she added. She's dead now Lily yolo repeated with deep sadness Eden glanced at her new friend. She understood didn't she somehow eden had communicated the very essence of her mother And her longing for her too when she said her name and yolo had understood She got the essence of eden's mother just from hearing her name It's amazing the sort of things you can learn when the author just decides to instantly implant information into your brain Later they go back to the pyramid and they talk with bramford for a bit And bramford tells eden that she shouldn't get attached to the aztecs because they're not our people like Fucking hell. I guess racism is okay sometimes just So anyways the priests kill yoloakley by cutting her heart out Yeah, it turns out. She's just a human sacrifice because again, they're They're aztecs. That's what they do and eden is upset about this even though yoloakley went willingly And she just openly in front of everybody swears that she's going to kill the priests A great way to endear yourself to these people This might have hit harder if one we knew yolo as a person Like we don't know anything about her. Why should we care about her? And if two we knew this wouldn't help Because again, this cut the cosmology here is not very well explained And it's possible that killing her actually does feed the gods and help and it will help Bring the world back to life. So in that case, it's more of a noble sacrifice But it's also possible that it it does nothing and we're not sure which one it is So If if we knew it wouldn't help it would be kind of heartbreaking But anyways eden knows she's going to adapt soon and she just bides her time and decides okay once I turn into a cat person i'm gonna kill these people and she There's a scene where she takes a hallucinogen the same one that sent Bramford on a spirit journey and she relives that scene of the white kids playing on a beach And this whole book is told in third person past tense But then this one little scene is told in first person present tense from eden's point of view I don't know why but that's what happens Eden learns that her dad is experimenting with newman's cure like rather than just chewing on it. He is actually Injecting it into his veins directly into his blood and that's why he seems so much healthier and this is bad because I I don't know why it's bad, but eden thinks it's bad So she takes all of his plants that he's using for his experiments and throws them into a fire Stupid cunt. It's not like those are valuable or anything and She takes some time to think about how awful it is that her father might be becoming a junkie Even though a couple of weeks ago. She was addicted to oxycontin or oxycodone technically a different thing Losing access to oxy was her biggest fear and Like she has no room to judge anybody or maybe she could at least Think about how I was that way and I don't want anyone else to be that way, but she doesn't I guess she's just a hypocrite. I don't know man And finally over 120 pages into the second book eden gets changed into a cat person I'm not sure how exactly because her father needed a bunch of advanced technology to change bramford And like both the Aztecs and the huaorani don't have any modern technology And they mentioned that he's putting some stuff together earlier, but like again, these people don't even have guns I don't know where they get such advanced computers and machinery that they'd be able to do this genetic Modification So now eden is also a furry, you know, she looks like bramford. She's tall muscular has claws sharp teeth And she the only thing different is that her fur is white and she is annoyed by the fact that her fur is white Okay, uh, that's that's a thing But she still thinks about how beautiful she is because you know, she's a furry and furries are beautiful And her animal instincts, which remember our thing apparently Take over for a bit and she runs off to kill the priests that sacrificed you lotely and as soon as she gets there She just decides she doesn't want to kill them Even though that was like her whole mission in life for a couple of weeks, but Okay, uh, they tell her she has to subdue bramford because bramford represents war and she represents love Again, this isn't very well explained like it says you need balance But like if they're both gone then that's balanced and if they're both there and they cancel each other out Like there's no difference between that and them being gone So I again, I don't know what's going on here So she takes yolo's head and buries it in the jungle for some reason the Aztecs chase after her Their chase they chase her for like a page. There's not really any action or anything and then it's it's just done And then bramford catches up with her and they fight for a minute because that's romantic. I guess Is that romantic? I don't know. I leave a comment down below if you and your significant other have ever had a fight to the death Finally we hear about bramford's tragic backstory So we learned his dad was black and he was maybe in the ffp But it's not totally clear either way the ffp killed him And at some point he cheated on bramford's mom with an asian woman Who was shen's mother and that's where shen came from And there was a line about how his mom pretended that she got raped in the tunnels because that's just very common And it was easier to explain than explaining an affair I'm not even touching that one where there's no one past it like There's too much rape here as is any rape here is too much But you know there's too much already and aztecs chase them some more again I don't know why like later they meet back up and they're all just they're all just friends again For some reason they're not angry and at some point during all this eden cuts her hand and it heals over Like real quick. She's like, whoa, what the hell that that was that was so fast. How did my hand heal so quick and She also learns that her other organs Are just constantly regenerating so she might actually be immortal And it turns out that uh, eden's father actually put the newman's cure plant into her serum when she got transformed into a furry And so her transformation was a bit different than bramford's and she's more powerful than him eden upon learning this is Upset and justifiably so I would say because her father is performing medical experiments on her without her consent Like I understand being upset about that, but she also wasn't letting him perform experiments on himself So it's not like she really has the high ground when it comes to bodily autonomy here You know, it's not like she's saying hey You can do that to yourself but just don't do it to me because I I have control over my own body but I also have control over yours like, you know, she has it seems a tad hypocritical but Again, whatever and the whole thing here is that this is still an experimental procedure Like turning her into a furry at all is experimental Because they've only done it once before they're still working the kinks out like they're gonna have to change some stuff eden This process is not understood and there are risks and they're just trying to figure out how it works Like that's that's how experimentation works. I'm sorry. I'm looking at my camera. Hopefully I don't run out of batteries before this thing is done So finally eden and bramford get married and then they go to bed together and I am skipping the next couple of pages. I I hope you don't mind like, you know, I Can deal with a lot of shit. I am not reading about furry sex. I'm just I'm not doing it and This is all that happens until about page 200 Like everything I've gone over that that's 200 pages of this shit and Finally around 200 pages in eden and bramford are hanging out in a cave together And a group of white soldiers hike hiking through the jungle finds them and bramford takes their life bands So they don't call out for help or anything and they all talk for a bit This comes completely out of nowhere But at least there's a plot now. So Okay, we'll deal with that So it turns out all these white soldiers are from a group called the league of maquis Which is a group of white terrorists fighting against the government They've never been mentioned before this I mean, like I said, there was one brief mention of a bombing by a pearl terror a white terrorist I'm sorry. It's so cringe to call them pearls. I'm just I'm not doing it But by a white terrorist, but it doesn't talk about how he's affiliated with any particular groups or ideologies or anything That might have been a good time to bring up the league of maquis You know, you could at least mention them once and even if they Don't play a role until later. You would at least be foreshadowing There's a brief flashback to a time when eden remembers a bomb going off and Her mom telling her that terrorism is bad because the bomb was placed there by the league of maquis And even if people mistreat them, it's not terrorism's bad And then this happens Had her mother really expected her to sit back and take the coals cruelty In the end eden had simply murmured her agreement why tax mother's meager energy even while contemplating a serious option If her 18th birthday approached with no potential mate in sight, she would join the maquis What did she have to lose if the unigov was going to kill her anyway? hold on eden considered being a terrorist Can I read that book because that sounds about 50 times more interesting than what we got here And I genuinely mean that like a story about how eden was a terrorist Could be really cool It could be about how she's an oppressed minority and she saw no other path to change So she decides to start joining up with people who like bomb civilians and shit But then over time she realizes. Okay, terrorism is bad or maybe she could learn about how There are other races that want things to change too. Like there are some black people who don't like how things are There are some white people who are okay with things as they are There are people of other races who want to change things, but they don't just want to reverse the discrimination so white people are on top and black people are on the bottom like There's so much you could do with that at the very least It would be a spin on the whole dystopian young adult thing like, you know Where there's just a rebellion that overthrows and evil governments like the rebellions usually just the good guys and You could do something with having them just be outright terrorists I don't know man. It's just frustrating to have that idea dangled in front of my face because that actually sounds kind of cool So shen sent a letter to bramford and the league of mckay gives it to him And he reads it and it turns out that shen gave up their location to the ffp in order to save his wife And then he committed suicide I'm invested i'm just i'm so invested Shen didn't even have a line of dialogue by the way Literally throughout both books. He does not a single line of dialogue. The only thing we're getting from his voice is This letter That's it We also learned that rebecca bramford's old wife is still alive because it turns out she was taken prisoner by the ffp But they didn't kill her the mckay rescued her She's also kind of a bitch Wrinkling her nose in distaste rebecca wagged a finger at eaton that strange cat girl Okay, I thought she cat was a stupid name, but it's better than cat girl. Let's let's not call her cat girl, please So they go back to the aztecs and the aztecs just decide that rebecca is the real goddess of love and she needs to turn into a cat person and All right, I guess we need a villain sure And from here things move pretty fast like this is the last I don't know 70 or 80 pages of the book And so kevin decides that he's evil and he joins them a key Who again? He's half black. He should have trouble fitting in you think but they just take him and there's no problems there And then he also transforms and he becomes a cat boy And then the whole world has apparently found out about the animal transformations Like yeah, somehow the word got down into the tunnels and everyone wants to become furries And there's also escalating violence In the tunnels between the ffp the league of mckay and the government I'm glad we're not seeing any of this by the way, you know like upheaval Action government, you know, that sounds like it might be kind of interesting. I'm glad we're just hearing about its second hand So the mckay attack the aztecs and eden hides her father somewhere to make sure they don't get a hold of his technology And rather than fighting the mckay who are the real villains at this stage Is she just it while she's in the jungle she fights a jaguar? And this fight is really difficult on her and it she gets a little bit injured and she almost dies and Why not have that same thing happen with the actual villains? That's what i'm confused about The mckay call for backup and one of their hovercrafts arrive Arrives and they take logan and bramford away and eden tries to save them, but she is unable to do so However, she does manage to kill them at the leader of the mckay He laughed you don't have bramford's fortune or resources. Still it's a pity. We would have made a good team Now he turned the laser gun on eden say goodbye newman Hello newman And then the book ends with eden and kevin talking to each other because kevin's good again I guess he just he was evil for a little while and then he was good again And then he was evil for a little while again with the league of mckay and now he's good again And uh, they just they vow to go after the bad guys and save the world And that's that's it. There there was a third book that was supposed to come out It's even advertised at the back of this one as freeing eden, but it It just never materialized. It was supposed to come out in 2014 I I assume that foight didn't make a lot of money off of these because they didn't sell super well And she just didn't want more hate from strangers on the internet, which is understandable to be honest So she just gave up on it. She said fuck this. No one cares and it's hard to blame her I will admit it's a bit frustrating to not get an ending here because Part of me just wants to see what would happen Part of me wants to see just how off the wall they could go here But the other part of me wants to paint my headboard with the inside contents of my skull. So I don't know. I guess I should just be grateful that freeing eden never came out Like maybe the day got saved by them just turning everyone into furries Like maybe that was the happy ending that they were planning. I don't know That was save the pearls and What the fuck I mean What the fuck It started off in a horrible place and it somehow got worse It started off so hard trying to be deep and profound and then it turns into jungle adventures minus the adventure Like there's not a single point In this entire series that I could point to and say, yeah, I liked that or I kind of liked that That there's one good line in the first book and other than that There's nothing here that I could point to and say was cool or good or well thought out at all Like I couldn't say that about the setting or the characters or the storyline or anything That's that's almost impressive. Like that at no point was there a sequence or a character that made me interesting That that made me interested. Uh, the plot just keeps stopping You know, even when semi-decent ideas come up the plot just Stops and it focuses more on the romance or just other random adventures Like like I said in the climax. Eden is just fighting a jaguar which has nothing to do with anything else The romance is left less than half-assed Like I didn't know that was possible, but it's less than half-assed And I just hate Eden so much. She's the main character and I despise her So goddamn much like at no point in this series. Does she ever consider the feelings of other people? She's just whiny and obsessed with getting a black boyfriend And then later she becomes obsessed with turning into a furry Like just I don't know Imagine a similar story with a black girl trying to get a white boyfriend Like the moral if the author was smart might be that she doesn't need a man to complete her or Going after someone for racial reasons is stupid and doesn't actually solve anything Like just trying to pick out some random white dude that doesn't help matters any But just I don't know. It's so strange to see it in either direction and Eden Never tries to fix this awful society You know, like I said, she's just a stupid selfish person who runs away from the world's problems and I don't know just what what can I add at this point? Like it's a absolutely absolutely horribly constructed series The only thing I can really do is read a few bad lines for you that I didn't mention before As he cupped her hips to his even folded around him like the water rounding into the shore She grabbed hold of his shoulders and arched her back into a parabola of pleasure A blood red sky twirled overhead a private canopy just for them Didn't you know he added your adopted aunt was a terrorist at heart She cut against convention her whole life As I said the Aztecs believed that this spiritual imbalance would bring about a war to end the world Wait to end their world or the entire world Anything is possible. All we can do is wait and see Despite her dreamy state Eden caught her meaning heart Your name means heart. No wonder you're so sweet And so on and so forth. There's there's a lot of those You know, like I said, you get free pdfs. Feel free to scroll through yourself, but Victoria foight has written other books before But she writes like an amateur. I I don't understand Like she has no idea how to structure a plot write a scene or research topics. She doesn't understand At least I assume she doesn't maybe her other books are amazing. I don't know like her most recent one came out in 2020 but If I had to guess and I don't know this for sure But if I had to guess I would say she tried to get this published traditionally And no one would take her manuscript. So she just said, you know what? Fine. I'm gonna publish it myself and part of me wants to respect that Because she's just saying I don't care what the rest of the world is saying. I this is my truth. This is what I want to do but She's terrible at it like sometimes you should listen to other people and just stop pursuing your dreams because your dreams are stupid This is just the absolute worst of self-publishing You know like it's just self indulgent and If there was an editor they sucked at their job like I counted 18 typos in all across both books and Well, that's a lot It doesn't even feel like she tried to be honest like I've said similar things before but like I can forgive a lot of flaws if it feels like you were at least Attempting to do something with them and if there was some passion behind it But it doesn't feel like Victoria Foight did that It feels like she was chasing a trend because she felt it would be her shot at the big leagues like she thought it would be her Shot at becoming a more successful author and that the books would sell super well and that she would just become One of the famous dystopian young adult authors that we all still remember who they are today, right? Everyone involved in this should be ashamed of themselves like everyone involved at any stage of this process of Bringing these books into the world should be ashamed of what they've brought upon us and Obviously, there's the racism, you know, I went over most of the big issues, but I left out some of the topics that come up over time like How characters consistently refer to the Aztecs as bloodthirsty savages, you know, it's just that There's other issues that I just I cannot get into and I know that foight tried to do something good here. I I know she tried but God Almighty you need self-awareness lady. You you need some self-awareness like Whenever you're gonna write about any topic you need to talk to someone who's familiar about it Otherwise, you just make an ass of yourself like Don't be afraid of asking questions and looking stupid privately When you could look stupid and egotistical very publicly because that's what happened here Victoria foight Just thought she already knew all she needed to know and Then she looked stupid. She made an ass of herself in front of the entire world Reading this made me feel like my eyeballs had been circumcised, you know, like Maybe this could have been something good. Maybe maybe it could have been something profound, but You know, it's possible like you would have to rewrite basically everything but It's possible, you know, it is possible and I normally try to end these things with like a big wrap up about the specific themes of the book or the book series that I was talking about and What makes this book not just doomed but failed from the start But in this case, I think it's pretty obvious, you know, I it's pretty obvious why this failed and why it fell apart Even after it was never assembled like Instead, I want to talk about how this book ties into its genre This makes absolutely zero sense as any sort of racial allegory or racial commentary It does make sense as a generic young adult dystopian novel Which is just put into the absolute worst possible setting See many of those YA dystopias, which were all fond of mocking and I'm very fond of mocking them too. They were Really more of a power fantasy written by well-off Americans You know, the whole message was basically just wouldn't it be awful if we were the oppressed ones? But it would also be great because then I would have the chance to be a hero and You know, there's just no examination of how dictatorships really functioned or how they Came into being how they eventually fall or even really what it's like for normal people to live in one and Save the pearls brings all those problems into very sharp clarity like In many cases it was basically just what if we treated white people the same way we already treat minorities or that we used to treat minorities But in this case, it's what if we treated white people worse than minorities? Kind of but then we also just pretended that the racism wasn't a thing until it came up and that is more about environmentalism and then Aztec gods like I don't know. It's like It's just a very interesting lens through which to view that whole genre and how it how and why it maybe died off so quick I seriously doubt i'm going to be covering more awful dystopian young adult novels after this at least not in like this long format because just I don't know if there's anything else I can do at this point like the testing was kind of fun And it was a good example of just how generic and soulless that entire genre could be But it is not getting worse than this. It is not getting worse than Save the pearls like I have read the worst example of that genre Everyone else can you just give up looking for it go home It's it's done. It's been done. It's the worst And victoria foy has gotten a lifetime of criticism over this I don't know if she's done any reflecting but I hope so because She's clearly got some weird ideas about how race works and how the world works in general and that's about all I Hopefully I never have to talk about this again like The way of the shadow wolves the steven sigal novel I reviewed a while ago Is worse than this like overall but At least it's funnier and at least it's shorter so I could get through it quicker like I just want to pretend that Save the pearls doesn't exist like The only reason I'm not shredding these books or burning these books is how much I paid for them like I just I don't know. I I don't want to talk about Save the pearls anymore. And now for a quick announcement I know that I said I would do the fifth sorceress after this and I'm still going to but I realized that's a very long series and it's going to take me a while to get through it Like normally I try to do these every three months but the thing is I already made you wait forever. It's been six months since I Put one of these videos out because I like I said it took me so long to get the second book in this series so In between this and the fifth sorceress I'm going to do a much shorter book one that I can cover a lot quicker This one is actually a romance novel, which is kind of nice. I haven't really Talked about romance just pure romance as a genre very much even though there's plenty of material to be mined there You know there's plenty of stuff to make fun of And it's also a book written by a celebrity. Well, he's not a celebrity in the traditional sense But you've definitely heard of him and you know me. I love bad celebrity books This one was written by an Iraqi fellow who went by the name of Saddam Hussein So join me next time for Zabiba and the king That's not a joke. By the way, Saddam Hussein really wrote this Bye Oh boy, that was uh, that was a long one. Thank you so much for watching if you made it this far Uh, if you see all these names on the screen here, those are the names of my patrons They give me money over on patreon And if you want to get your name here and get access to things like early access to videos then consider donating My ten dollar and up patrons are aposavalanan, olivia rayan, brother santotes, buffy valentine, carolina clay Dan ant sellievich dark king deo echo evy flax great grebo carcat katsune Liza rudakova lord tiebreaker madison lewis benet, matthew bodro Microphone peep the toad return of kardamom sad martigan sillier the vixen tesla shark bay victus and wesley Without you guys, I don't know if I'd be able to do this and if you Can't give money on patreon or you just don't want to then just subscribe to my channel Uh, like this video comment on it to help spread it around Or maybe become a youtube channel member, which is similar But you don't have to create another account or send me a tip over on paypal You know, those are all those are all great. Anyways, I'll see you next week. Uh, have a nice day night. Whatever time it is. Goodbye