Publisher: Tor Teen
Publication Date: January 31, 2012
Goodreads Description:
New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., have been abandoned.
The Bill of Rights has been revoked, and replaced with the Moral Statutes.
There are no more police—instead, there are soldiers. There are no more fines for bad behavior—instead, there are arrests, trials, and maybe worse. People who get arrested usually don't come back.
Seventeen-year-old Ember Miller is old enough to remember that things weren't always this way. Living with her rebellious single mother, it's hard for her to forget that people weren't always arrested for reading the wrong books or staying out after dark. It's hard to forget that life in the United States used to be different.
Ember has perfected the art of keeping a low profile. She knows how to get the things she needs, like food stamps and hand-me-down clothes, and how to pass the random home inspections by the military. Her life is as close to peaceful as circumstances allow.
That is, until her mother is arrested for noncompliance with Article 5 of the Moral Statutes. And one of the arresting officers is none other than Chase Jennings—the only boy Ember has ever loved.
Review:
I want to start by saying that the last fourth, perhaps even third, of the book was pretty good. If I were reviewing a novel that had started out the way it ended, I would probably be saying something completely different. However, That is not how Article 5 began. Article 5 begins with some seriously flawed world building that not only creates a bad novel, but also encourages some very bad political ideas and behaviors.
The premise of Article 5 is that a totalitarian theocracy controls what amounts to a dystopic contemporary America as a result of a war - The War. The War apparently included some bombing of major US cities, but left other areas almost completely untouched. It was severe enough to warrant the re-establishment of the draft and wiped out our basic media infrastructure. However, at least as far as can be inferred from the novel, it did not affect Mexico or Canada. Also, it lasted less than three years. There is very little information about the War provided, but what is provided is conflicting in nature. The physical effects of the war imply an external 'other' - that this war is with a nation that is geographically independent of the US. However, the socio-political effects do not match up with this sort of war.
American voters are, in actuality, on a spectrum. We have Liberals and Conservatives on each extreme jockeying for control, hoping to sway the Moderate Independents in the middle to their side each election. The result, therefore, is that, on really polar issues, the country is often divided into fairly equal, diametrically opposed sides with a huge mass of not-as-concerned people in the middle. That is part of why our politics tend to take a pendulum-type pattern - it takes something extreme to move the middle. In order to have such an extreme Neo-Conservative government take power, we would have had to have experienced a civil war, or a long, sustained war with an external 'other.' Neither of these options are even remotely possible with the way the war is described. (Seriously. Bush barely pulled 50.7% of the popular vote against a weak opponent three years after 9/11 while fighting two ongoing wars!!!)
Therefore, a contemporary America that could be interchanged for Nazi Germany, with a Morality Militia reminiscent of the Iranian militias and the Republican Guard, is really implausible based on Simmons' premise. On this shaky ground she then proceeds to build every Liberal's worst nightmare of America. Each flash-point is pulled directly from our current headlines, divided perfectly down the R/D line. However, most of what Simmons shows in the early part of the novel, while frustratingly offensive to most liberals, would have the average conservative saying, "yeah, and?"
This is where I have to ask myself who, precisely, Simmons intended as her audience. I mean, I get that she anticipates them to be teenagers - hence the young adult label. However, no age group has uniformly similar beliefs. There are conservative teenagers, liberal teenagers, and those who could really care less. Her portrayal of the 'liberal' characters is just sympathetic enough, and the 'conservatives' just offensive enough, to alienate most conservative readers. If she was trying to change anyone's political beliefs by showing some of the hazier implications of conservative ideology (which she admittedly does later in the novel), she fails by alienating her conservative readers early on. I doubt they even finish it. The worst part? If they do, it only reaffirms the often held belief of the religious conservative that all liberals are out to malign them as evil, simply for being religious and conservative.
More dangerously, though, is what I feel this book does to the liberal reader. The further the book progresses, the worse it gets. Article 5 is perfectly calibrated to push every liberal hot button. It makes your blood boil. It makes you angry. You feel frustrated rage and what those conservatives are doing to our country!!!......in a book. It is, in short, fear and hate mongering! Yes, these issues echo our current newspapers. BUT we are still working on it! There are equal and opposite reactions from the other side as well.
The only way to make a democracy work, without tearing ourselves apart, is to encourage discourse. When we are busy whipping ourselves up into a fervor over imagined slights, it discourages discourse in a serious way. America has real problems right now. Women's rights are seriously in danger. Religious freedom is daily being called into question. The LGBTQ community is still systematically disenfranchised. Racial equality has not yet been obtained. We have problems, but books like this - books that encourage righteous anger but offer no answers - contribute to the problem, not the solution. This is why, in my opinion, if you want to tackle serious issues in current events through fiction, it is best to create artificial distance by making the characters aliens or dragons, creating a futuristic or fantastical setting. Books like this are too personal. You can't get people to listen to you if they are busy defending themselves.
Add to these problems a heroine who is truly too stupid to live - and who is UTTERLY CLUELESS about basic world history if she believes all she professes to through the book. She also had to basically have lived in a box during the war to treat Chase the way she did when he had to become physically violent to protect her. (Perhaps I am reading too much into this, but I eventually thought of Ember as an allegorical representation of how the politically active often view the 'clueless' mass of moderates in the middle. I can't even count how many times I have seen people on both sides of the fence nearly scream in frustration, 'how do they not see what is going on?!' I was definitely screaming that at Ember.)
In Simmons' defense, once she quite pushing her political agenda the book really did get quite enjoyable. I really liked Chase, and the action was fast paced and engrossing. I just really didn't like how Simmons got there. I don't think I will be recommending this book.
Purchased from Barnes & Noble Nook Books
Review also appears on Goodreads
