An action-packed, blood-soaked, futuristic debut thriller set in a world where the murder rate is higher than the birthrate. For fans of Moira Young’s Dust Lands series, La Femme Nikita, and the movie Hanna.
Meadow Woodson, a fifteen-year-old girl who has been trained by her father to fight, to kill, and to survive in any situation, lives with her family on a houseboat in Florida. The state is controlled by The Murder Complex, an organization that tracks the population with precision.
The plot starts to thicken when Meadow meets Zephyr James, who is—although he doesn’t know it—one of the MC’s programmed assassins. Is their meeting a coincidence? Destiny? Or part of a terrifying strategy? And will Zephyr keep Meadow from discovering the haunting truth about her family?
Action-packed, blood-soaked, and chilling, this is a dark and compelling debut novel by Lindsay Cummings.
There’s a video on YouTube where Sasha Alsberg and Lindsay Cummings try to promote Zenith and their favorite books by speculating about what sort of books Andi would enjoy reading.
Lindsay, being the humble creature that she is, says that Andi would enjoy this book. Why? Because Andi would recognize Meadow’s methods as similar to her own? Because Andi would enjoy reading an edgy “thriller” because she too is edgy? Or even because both Andi and Meadow are beautiful waifish white girls with silver hair who don’t particularly mind killing people?
Actually, no, you absolute fool. Sasha speculates on why Andi would enjoy this book (because of the title and how both Meadow and Andi have … uh … something … in common) and tries and fails to give Lindsay a way out. Lindsay admits to not listening, occupied with her book, which she lovingly strokes while staring into the camera.
I think this says a lot about Lindsay herself, Andi’s personality (or rather, lack thereof), and most importantly, the content of this here book.
This review contains spoilers and discussions of potentially triggering topics.
The Writing
I don’t have much to say here. Zenith was far, far worse when you just compare the prose. It’s simple, bare-bones, and straight to the point. Perfectly mediocre and not memorable at all. It flows well enough, and if it weren’t for uuuh everything else in this book, I’d say it’s a quick and easy read.
It does get very melodramatic and edgy at times, but that is to be expected, and since the melodrama mostly avoids getting too purple or lasting too long, I will officially give Cummings the “I could read your book mostly without cringing at the words” award.
The story is told from Meadow and Zephyr’s POVs, and I’d have to disagree with other reviewers who said that their narration was too similar. I mean, it wasn’t spectacular and they definitely had some overlap in expressions, but I could tell that Cummings was making a conscious effort to make them distinct and for me, it worked (mostly past the first half of the book where both of them just mope around and sound very similar), so I commend that.
The Characters
Now, while Andi OH SHIT FUCK I DIDN’T MEAN TO DO THAT THAT WASN’T A BIT I LITERALLY JUST TYPED ANDI INSTEAD OF MEADOW
Now, while Meadow and Zephyr are distinct, that doesn’t really mean they’re good characters, yea? Honestly, they’re pretty much the only ones who get any type of development and the only ones who can, paradoxically, turn off their edge and just be normal people every now and then.
Meadow is supposedly this Strong Femail Charactor who does Bad Things for Good Reasons. And … I mean, yeah? Like, I don’t remember ever feeling like she obsessed over a man, and her motivations were always either keeping her little sister safe or surviving or figuring out the mystery around their society and how it ties into her own family. As far as YA heroines go, Meadow isn’t terrible. But she’s not exactly interesting, either. She’s always collected and rarely loses her cool, she displays few emotions outside of anger, and is generally cold and downplayed to the point of having barely any personality traits. I guess it’s sort of on purpose? But there are ways of making a character subtle and still interesting, and Meadow just feels like somebody packaged a Strong Femail Charactor right out of the factory without slapping some paint on her first. Idk, I guess if this is what Lindsay was going for then she did a good job, but personally I prefer my protags to be a bit more … more.
I will apologize to Meadow for calling her Andi, though. Andi is a lot more smug and obnoxious and has fewer reasons to be.
Zephyr is a harder to define because I’m pretty sure he’s intended to be more colorful than Meadow, but he comes off as even more generic than her. He’s a convincing enough teenage boy at times, because he lusts after Meadow like a puppy and thinks in super dramatic and poetic prose about how perfect and beautiful she is. But outside of that, he just sort of exists and the plot happens to him? He has no consistent personality traits and no flaws that he has control over. He’s partially brainwashed to murder on command and he’s like, sad about it, for a second, but accepts it pretty quickly and swears to help Meadow out for … reasons? Idk I guess he’s in love with her or whatever. The blurb implies he wants to keep her from discovering the truth but he pretty much helps her from the start.
He’s perfectly non-threatening — a boy next door type if next door was a war zone. Most of the time I wonder how many hands he needs to count all his braincells. One? Or mayhaps two? Whatever happens he just sort of rolls with after a chapter or two of angst and he ends up feeling like he’s a crutch for Meadow, a non-character there to fill the role of the snarky sidekick whose personal conflict is a minor subplot, which is admittedly fairly unusual in YA, but for a co-protagonist isn’t ideal, as one might imagine.
Koi is Meadow’s overprotective older brother who wants to beat up Zephyr for reasons and refuses to chill. And yes, that’s his name.
Periwinkle/Peri is Meadow’s younger sister and Meadow’s Moality Pet. And yes, that’s her name.
Meadow’s dad is an abusive asshole dad who is Too Hard On His Children but whose lessons Turn Out To Be Helpful in the end. No, it’s not his name but I can’t remember what it is and can’t be assed to look it up because he’s just Meadow’s dad. Oh and he likes torture? While Meadow acknowledges her dad is fucked up he’s still treated as this wise authority figure who gives good advice and is only a result of his environment. Society is evil, so that’s why he treats his children like shit and teaches them how to murder good. It’s to protect them, see?
Talan is Zephyr’s best friend and teenage sex worker who lost her child and now is vaguely suicidal but it’s supposed to be charming and quirky??? Talan is the only major character to die brutally for shock value and she seems to welcome it. Tbh she was the only interesting character in the whole book so I actually felt bad when she was killed off like that.
And then there’s a bunch of other characters but what’s the point of me telling you about them since they’re all generic as hell and only exist to spout exposition at Meadow and her boy toy.
There was another character I liked well enough, but only because she was the only PoC and her name was Sketch, which is a pretty neat name, but she didn’t have much of a personality except “snarky hardass” and was basically a Deluxe Edition of an existing “snarky hardass” character. She appears only in the late chapters of the book and is there to get brutalized for the sake of our two white protags. She didn’t die though, so there’s that?
The Plot
Alright, alright, I guess I have to write something.
I honestly have no fucking idea what the plot was. The blurb pretty much tells it all: Meadow meets Zephyr, they fall in love (?), Zephyr goes all Terminator on her ass and she’s like ??? and then uh … turns out Meadow’s family/dead mom are involved in the Murder Complex, which is the thing that’s making Zephyr and other random people kill others when remotely “activated” and so now they gotta find out what the heckity heck is going on, I guess?
It’s a clear enough plot but the motivations are a little weak, especially on Zephyr’s side. One would think he’d like to get rid of the whole “murder on command” thing in his brain but he seems to be able to fight it off easily once he meets Meadow and he’s more focused on helping her for reasons.
Yeah, I’m … I’ve already forgotten large chunks of the story so that should tell you something.
The “Worldbuilding”
O SHIT HERE COMES THE JUICY PART OF THE REVIEW.
*clears throat* Here we go:
The Shallows, Night Siren, the Initiative, Catalogue Number, Commandments of the Shallows, Creds, the Perimeter, the Silent Hour, Before, Rations Department, Pirates, the Dark Time, the Pulse, the Pin, the Red train, the Blue train, Wards, the Leeches, the Graveyard, the Survivors, Rations Hall, Initiative Headquarters, Wards of the State, the Gravers, NoteScreen, Evaluator, the Catalogue Dome, the Pit, Cred Orb, the Furnace Room, the Library, Sellout, the Hospital, the Believers …
Holy shit I don’t think I’ve gotten all of the Important Names yet and I’m already tired.
Y’all. This is the worst case of worldbuilding laziness I’ve seen in a while, and I’m someone who absolutely hates worldbuilding and will let authors get away with minimal effort. This? This is awful. And the thing is? I get it. I might’ve forgiven this because coming up with names is HARD and we humans usually go for the obvious anyway so this makes some amount of sense.
The problem is the fact that there are some words and concepts that are PERFECTLY REGULAR (i.e. the Hospital is literally just a fucking hospital) but still capitalized for no goddamn reason other than it being an attempt at sounding all sci-fi and dystopian without any actual effort. Everything blends together and the concepts are so generic and so MANY that it just becomes noise and you’re forced to simply roll with it and stop trying to actually imagine what anything looks like or where it’s located or how it works.
*takes deeep breath*
Speaking of how it works, let me tell you about the main premise. Basically, there was a war, a big war that tore the US apart like Lisa tears apart Johnny. Those who survived the war were infected with a plague, creatively named the Plague, that threatened to wipe out the population. One 20-year-old scientist cured the Plague, along with literally everything else, including death. Thanks to “nanites”, humans can no longer die of natural causes. This leads to overpopulation, and to stop this, the person who invented this all-cure comes up with another absolutely brilliant idea: let’s make MORE humans, but these humans have brains that are programmed to kill on command. Who gets murdered is chosen at random each and every night in a lottery, and survivors have to clean up dozens of new corpses every morning. (Meadow mentions the death rate is now 300 people per month.)
Yeah. I know. The same brilliant scientist who CURED DEATH not only fails to reverse the effects of their own invention, but decides that factory printing brainwashed humans who are then released into the world to also consume resources along with their victims is the best course of action?
Also, there are old people in this book. How are they still aging? How do you cure death but keep the aging? Why do you kill random people for shits and giggles instead of offing the semi-sentient sacks of flesh that the old people are bound to become as their bodies grow and decline but refuse to die? Surely you need young people to work in your factories? If resources are scarce, why keep old people alive past the point where they can contribute to society? If you have the technology to make remote controlled brains, why can’t you yank those bad boys out and just put them into robot bodies?
Why did nobody consider sterilization? I know this is a dangerous and sensitive topic that a white author probably shouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole, but if you’re ok with writing indiscriminate murder and pretend that shit wouldn’t become very racist very fast, then you could do the same with sterilization. You can’t tell me that the nanites are so good they could grow you a new uterus. Evidently they’re not good enough to heal bullet wounds or stab wounds or else your little “murder complex” wouldn’t fucking work, would it?
I’m not saying these are “better” options than murder lottery, because these are all terrible things, but I am saying that they’re definitely more logical and profitable if you’re an evil government. Compared to making new people from scratch to kill your already existing people, anyway.
There are also implications of this all being a lie to control the population so that the “Initiative” can remain in control, along with the usual shitty YA dystopia thing where it’s implied that Earth is fucked and we’re out of resources.
This whole thing is a mess of half-assed concepts that are never explored but just sort of jammed together into an incoherent mess. There’s a big war, there’s a big plague, there’s senseless murder, there’s an evil government, there’s child soldiers, there’s brainwashing, there’s a rebel Resistance, there’s climate change … There’s even an Aptitude Test or whatever that never comes back despite being very angsted and exposited about in the opening chapters. It’s like Lindsay read all the YA dystopias that came before and couldn’t pick a gimmick and just went for all of them.
Oh I haven’t even mentioned the funniest part of all this: the swearing. As with Zenith, Lindsay has no problem describing gory murder and calling female characters “sluts”, but actual human curse words like shit and fuck? Don’t be silly. This is CHILD AND PUBLISHER FRIENDLY. Shit is now “skitz”, “fuck” is now “flux”. Can you imagine reading this fluxing bullskitz? WE NEVER EVEN FIND OUT WHAT THESE WORDS MEAN OR WHY THEY WERE REPLACED, SINCE THIS TAKES PLACE RECENT ENOUGH THAT MEADOW REMEMBERS GOING TO BASEBALL GAMES.
Oh and there’s also ChumHead, which, you guessed it, is never explained.
I guess now we know who to blame for “fike” and “starshined”. Oh and there are swears related to the stars in this book as well. I think Lindsay needs to get off that SJM juice.
The Edgy
Allow me to feed quotes into your gaping brain mouths. Not a lot of them because most of my notes are just me going WHAT at the concepts and the names more than the phrasing.
Every night, I stay awake for as long as I can to keep my nightmares at bay.
Scars are trophies in the Shallows. They show we know how to cheat death.
In a paragraph before this one, Meadow mentions that nanites heal everything but leave scars behind for reasons, and it happens to everyone. So why would they be a status symbol?
It’s the moon. The moon that reminds me of the moonlit girl.
My moonlit girl. She’s the cure to my nightmares, the one thing that helps me feel safe when I can’t even trust my own dreams to harbor me.
Spoken like a real teenage boy, Zeph. Would you like some tissues with that spunk?
I hold the door open for [Talan], but she shrugs past me and opens the other one. Always independent. Never taking help from anyone.
Hi is this a Feminism?
I find two leather thigh sheathes and strap them to my legs. I slide two knives into them and stand, slinging the bow over my shoulder. […] Feeling angry. But feeling strong.
Convenient sexy makeover includes leather knife pockets and a cool but completely-impractical-due-to-the-existence-of-enemy-guns crossbow. I also want to mention that the book calls crossbow ammo “arrows”, when they’re usually referred to as bolts, but go off.
The Conclusion
The Murder Complex is a book that straddles the line between mediocre and bad. Its biggest flaw is how boring and shallow its ideas and characters are. Which basically means its biggest flaw is everything about it. I can’t say it was so bad it’s good, but I can’t exactly call it terrible because I’ve read far, far worse. It’s mediocre writing about bland characters angsting and murdering their way through a convoluted plot that’s based on worldbuilding as solid as half-eaten ham standwich found in a rainy alleyway. It’s not fun or entertaining to read and there’s nothing to get outrageously mad about.
In the end, I don’t think you should pick this up unless you’ve somehow read every other book in the world and this is the only one left. Don’t waste your time on this, not even as a joke. Don’t make my sacrifice be in vain.
I swallow hard. She's right. But if something happens to her, I'll never forgive myself. "Then I'll let you go," I say, and lean forward to cut the bindings. "But... you owe me something first."'And that is?" She's still staring up at the sky."A kiss" I say.Her eyes never meet mine."Well?" I ask.She nods and smiles, finally throwing me a stare that's as deadly as poison "You can kiss my ass, Zephyr James. ― Lindsay Cummings, The Murder Complex
Essa é uma distopia na qual acompanhamos a Meadow e o Zephyr. Enquanto ela foi treinada pelo pai para sobreviver em um novo mundo onde a taxa de mortalidade é maior que a de natalidade, ele trabalha para o governo e é cheio de segredos. Os dois se conhecem de uma forma inusitada, e isso, no futuro, pode trazer muitos problemas.
Esse livro tem uma premissa bem interessante, no entanto, sinto que a autora caiu no clichê das distopias e acabou não sabendo desenvolver muito bem a história. Apesar da leitura ser fluida e ter me deixado bem curiosa, algumas coisas me incomodaram como cenas que pareciam forçadas e desconexas, tinham momentos muito convenientes e comentários machistas. Sem contar que as coisas demoraram de acontecer, mas mesmo assim me manteve entretida.
Também cheguei em um ponto onde tinham algumas coisas sem explicar e isso me incomodou, mas no geral a leitura foi bem divertida e me fez matar saudade das distopias. Não posso negar que o livro é cheio de reviravoltas, o que o tornou um pouco melhor, apesar de algumas delas terem sido um pouco óbvias. Então, apesar de ter me decepcionado, foi uma leitura que de certa forma me agradou.
Esse livro não foi lançado no Brasil e nem sei se vai, não vi muito alvoroço em torno dele. Recomendo para quem gosta de distopia e quer se distrair um pouco, sem muitas expectativas. Obrigada por lerem :)
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A few days ago I ordered 2 new books and they finally came in today and I’m so excited. The books I got are “Salt to the Sea” by Ruta Sepetys which I’ve already read but I decided I needed to own because Ruta Sepetys writing style and her books are absolutely beautiful, and I could only wish to write something as half as beautiful as she does one day, and the other book I got is “The Murder Complex,” by Lindsay Cummings. I’ve been a fan of Lindsay Cummings’ youtube channel for awhile now, and I”m super excited to get into it, and enjoy her work. The book itself sounds like a really fun, and exciting read. Maybe once I finish it, I’ll do a book review.
The lighting right now in my house is shit, otherwise I was gonna take some super lit photos of the books in all their beautiful glory, but maybe I’ll do that tomorrow. because I’m really excited. to read them, and I also just haven’t bought new books in a long time. I forgot how much fun it is to hold and own a beautiful new book.
