Skye is a gamer, a club kid and is busy testing a game
for bugs before its released while hanging out with her DJ boyfriend. It’s a
happy life, but rather ruined by increasing insomnia and nightmares.
Which turns out to be the shadows of a whole other world –
and a whole other life for her. Life on Terra, a world whose surface has been
destroyed after a devastating war, the surviving inhabitants now huddle
underground in two distinct classes. The Indys who live lives of luxury and
wealth. And the Deep Siders, reduced to poverty and living in horrendous and
dangerous conditions beneath, providing the labour that makes the society work.
Their lives are cheap – because there is an over-population problem.
And into this comes Skye – only everyone calls her
Mariah. Leader of a revolution, saviour of the underclass, trying to bring
peace and justice to the oppressed. Or there’s the Circle of 8, who see her as
a perfect ambassador for Earth and to encourage more of the population to “Moongaze”
and live on Earth instead of Terra – slackening the overpopulation problem.
Except, of course, it costs a lot of money to Moongaze.
Skye has to decide between the 2 factions – but also
between Earth and Terra and who she actually is – which of her memories, her
realities, is actually the real one?
I don’t say this as, necessarily, a criticism, but a lot
of this book was predictable. I saw what Skye was going to do long before she
did it, I could pretty much see what path she would take – rejection, working
with the enemy, being repulsed, back to the allies, the alternating between
Earth and Terra again true love soon following. All of this I could see mapped
out within the first few chapters. But the reason why it was predictable is
because the character was very real, very human and reacted in a sensible
manner. It didn’t mean she wasn’t emotional or that she was always right – not at
all – but it did mean that you could see what she would think or feel or do
because a reasonable person in her situation would have done exactly the same
thing. Her reactions are predictable because, in the same situation, I would
have done exactly the same thing. She is faced with her entire world being
turned upside down several times. She is constantly fighting a battle of identity
– who actually is she? What memories are real? What reality is real? Can she be
a person who has such small priorities – even if they are HER priorities – when
a world literally stands in the balance? Who is the actual person and how much
of any kind of relationship can she have with Dawn when he’s thinking of the
woman she used to be? (This is an interesting twist but, on the whole, I think
the romance is superfluous to the story and, worse, it ends up being hurried or
based on false memories neither of which are ideal).
And while it was predictable, that didn’t mean it wasn’t fun. Knowing roughly how the journey will go doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the nuances of the trip. The world and story are interesting. I particularly love how the revolution was presented and developed. No glorious battle against superior forces, no plucky revolutionary heroes solving everything, even if they were inspirational and did some heroic acts. And there was no quick solution – they didn’t act like their victory would suddenly make everything wonderful and easy and that the whole system would come down nor did they say that just killing the big bad would make the whole system fall apart or magically become just. Their revolution is built on giving the Deep Siders a chance at independence, at separation. They worked to improve the lives of the Deep Siders, give them more advantages and make them less focused on the Indys for their needs – it was a slow revolution, but it was an effective and very real revolution.
