The Selection

This review contains spoilers. But not spoilers for this book. Spoilers for a different book, which was published in 1862, so I don't even think you can really call them spoilers at this point.

So a few days ago I was working through more of Les Miserables. The men were in the barricade, and fighting, and in a single paragraph, Victor Hugo wrote, “— died, —- died,” essentially killing off like five of the main characters (of the barricade section of the novel, not the whole novel, this thing is like 1500 pages) in a single paragraph. And that night I told Matt, “You know what Victor Hugo did today??” And he laughed at my phrasing as I told him about everyone dying.

So this morning at breakfast I was reading The Selection and I told Matt, “I'm like 50 pages from the end and there are still 25 girls in this competition. This book is totally going to end on a cliffhanger, and I really don't care enough to read the next four or five books. Maybe I'll Wikipedia it to see what happens in the rest of them.”

“Maybe it won't end in cliffhanger,” Matt said. “Maybe they'll get Victor Hugo'd.”

I won't spoil the ending for you, in case you still want to read this, though I can't say I'd recommend it. It's got some major problems with the world building, with misogyny, with classism. I kept picturing Caesar Flickerman, like this was the beginning parts of the Hunger Games but for 300 pages and not as inventive or well-written. It's kind of infuriating, and while the story was quick-paced, I don't really care about these characters, so I'm not gonna bother with the rest.