Its been a while since Ive read a book that has impressed me, and so when I picked up and got instantly sucked into THE UNIDENTIFIEDs riveting and eerily familiar world, I was beside myself with happiness. THE UNIDENTIFIED is smart, well-written, and suspenseful, the perfect example of what dystopian literature should be: a fully realized and recognizable world without forgoing characterization and plot.
Rae Mariz impressively introduces us to a shocking and complex futuristic world, one in which privacy has no meaning thanks to the constant flow of information and technological interconnection. With Facebooks recent introduction of the disconcertingly stalker-like See Friendship button, the issues regarding privacy that THE UNIDENTIFIED explores in such an entertaining and intelligent fashion are so much more immediately relevant. Rae Mariz succeeds in crafting for us a scarily plausible world that is possibly an inevitable extrapolation of the already network-filled world of Facebook and Twitter that we live in.
THE UNIDENTIFIED is smart, but its also hardly boring. Kids voice is fresh, with just the right amount of quippy attitude. Shes the perfect balance of the observant outsider with the propensity to create change, and the gullible market to which the Corporations are pandering. And Kids not the only interesting and well-developed characters. Her two best friends, Ari and Mikey, light up the page with their very different personalities whenever they appear in a scene. Even more minor characters are fully realized with their limited on-page time. The characterization is really an incredible accomplishment for a 300-something page book, which most might even consider short for modern dystopian novel standards.
I really wish I had the capacity to speak more about THE UNIDENTIFIEDs marvelous critique of the infiltration of networking websites in our lives. But Ill leave that to the academics, and just let you know that this book does it, along with providing us a highly unputdownable adventure. I dont think I can recommend this book enough. READ IT if youre looking for smart and snappy dystopian literature.
Rae Mariz impressively introduces us to a shocking and complex futuristic world, one in which privacy has no meaning thanks to the constant flow of information and technological interconnection. With Facebooks recent introduction of the disconcertingly stalker-like See Friendship button, the issues regarding privacy that THE UNIDENTIFIED explores in such an entertaining and intelligent fashion are so much more immediately relevant. Rae Mariz succeeds in crafting for us a scarily plausible world that is possibly an inevitable extrapolation of the already network-filled world of Facebook and Twitter that we live in.
THE UNIDENTIFIED is smart, but its also hardly boring. Kids voice is fresh, with just the right amount of quippy attitude. Shes the perfect balance of the observant outsider with the propensity to create change, and the gullible market to which the Corporations are pandering. And Kids not the only interesting and well-developed characters. Her two best friends, Ari and Mikey, light up the page with their very different personalities whenever they appear in a scene. Even more minor characters are fully realized with their limited on-page time. The characterization is really an incredible accomplishment for a 300-something page book, which most might even consider short for modern dystopian novel standards.
I really wish I had the capacity to speak more about THE UNIDENTIFIEDs marvelous critique of the infiltration of networking websites in our lives. But Ill leave that to the academics, and just let you know that this book does it, along with providing us a highly unputdownable adventure. I dont think I can recommend this book enough. READ IT if youre looking for smart and snappy dystopian literature.
As i sit here writing my review, i realize I'm not 100% sure how i feel about this book. The first 40 pages or so, i kept wanting to quit reading. This new dystopian world is thrown at you, without much explanation as to why it got there and how. They explain how the game works, but not much else. I found myself struggling in the beginning to outline how everything worked. For some reason i kept picking up the book to see what happened, but the more i read, the more disappointed i became. In the end i felt cheated. Nothing really happened. To me, the book was written as a message to what will become of us in this facebook and twitter age. It seemed that the book was written with a message and concept in mind, not a novel.
Read my full review at: http://bourg.info/2013/12/22/unidentified-rae-mariz/
What I found the best part of the book had to be the detailed view of the future, which included awesome gadgets (I would totally buy a heartthrob.) I also liked how this book lead me to think of things that teens deal with in a different way. The book had an underlying message that kept coming up, a message where in a world where teens had everything they could want in The Game outside of it they were really banned from society and lacked any kind of freedom. The Game itself was just an illusion of freedom.
Im not sure why Mariz decided to look at this point of teenage freedoms. I wonder if it came from a lack of freedom when she was a teenager or if she feels that the teens of today and tomorrow will have less freedoms than those of us in Generations X and Y. The book goes into detail how teens are constantly monitored by GPS and how they are banned from most stores and from congregating outside of The Game. Whether Marizs future will in some form come to pass or not, The Unidentified will definitely get teens and adults thinking and talking about what the future may hold.
What I found the best part of the book had to be the detailed view of the future, which included awesome gadgets (I would totally buy a heartthrob.) I also liked how this book lead me to think of things that teens deal with in a different way. The book had an underlying message that kept coming up, a message where in a world where teens had everything they could want in The Game outside of it they were really banned from society and lacked any kind of freedom. The Game itself was just an illusion of freedom.
Im not sure why Mariz decided to look at this point of teenage freedoms. I wonder if it came from a lack of freedom when she was a teenager or if she feels that the teens of today and tomorrow will have less freedoms than those of us in Generations X and Y. The book goes into detail how teens are constantly monitored by GPS and how they are banned from most stores and from congregating outside of The Game. Whether Marizs future will in some form come to pass or not, The Unidentified will definitely get teens and adults thinking and talking about what the future may hold.
Maybe it's not fair to write this review because I didn't finish the book but I didn't like this book so much I feel compelled to review it. I was so excited to get it and I was so disappointed in its boring storyline with so much new technology that I just couldn't stand to keep reading it. I couldn't follow along because I was so bored, I couldn't connect with any of the characters, and I came to the point where I didn't even care anymore about what happened or how it ended.
