FITS Virtual Book Tour: Day 8
I would like to start this out by saying FITS looks like it should be your average young adult novel. It has the obligatory dystopian setting, the power-crazed leader, the group with special abilities, the rebel group, the falling apart city, the early introduction of a man set up to be the main character’s love interest. The main character, Harper, even starts out reading like the protagonist in a YA novel- A bad ass criminal who has rich parents, shipped off to the dystopian setting because she got caught. You have the charming support cast, which, yes, does have a few outliers from the formula, but that’s to be expected. After all, the authors must maintain some amount of originality.
But once I’d moved past the third or forth chapter, I was struck by the differences I saw both in the way the characters were constructed and in the way they all interacted. Harper, far from a cliche, acted like a true human being. Every action she took was tied to the person she was. There was no sense of nobility in her actions- everything she did was for her own survival or the survival of her friends, or for her own personal gain. Gage became unable to trust her because of it, which was in line with his moral code. Sophia was so broken by events that led up to the dissolving of the group that she could hardly think, Lars started off and the foreshadowing involved with his plot arc was masterfully done. Hazel’s blind sense of loyalty led her into the plot and kept with her to the end of it, and honestly I was amazed by how little it seemed like your average YA novel.
But the characters weren’t the only things that amazed me. Characters were introduced and then promptly killed. Things that seemed off about the island were pushed to a breaking point, side plots were done with precision and expertise that some authors in the mainstream can’t accomplish. The other main character, Clint, was written in a similar fashion. His motives were clean and precise. His actions were those of a man with nothing to lose, and that was the intention. While sometimes his reasoning was wrong, it always made sense to the character, and if it ever seemed like there was nothing he wouldn’t do, it’s because that was the case.
Then came the end of the book. Everything was moving so quickly, but that’s the way it was meant to be. And as everything started to fall apart, I realized that I had already begun to suspect- that this book didn’t follow a formula. It took cliches and twisted them, took the YA plot and turned it into something darker and completely unexpected. By the time I was reading the epilogue, I wasn’t really surprised by what the authors did. Blown away by it? Yes. Absolutely. 100%. But at the same time I think it has become one of my favorite YA novels, if only because I didn’t see any of it coming. For someone who’s read as much young adult literature as I have, that’s a thing which rarely happens, and it’s nice to see it from authors with so many books left to write.
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