Quite recently, I read “The Testing”, by Joelle Charbonneau. While it may not be good enough to gain a permanent spot on your bookshelf (unless, like me, you have multiple bookshelves and boxes filled with books), it’s certainly worth a read, especially if you liked other dystopian novels like this one. It doesn’t add much new material to Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games trilogy or Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy, but it’s a great book all the same, even if it’s relatively unoriginal. It’s set after the Seven Stages of war–the first Four Stages were about humans’ war against each other, and in the last three, the earth “fought back”, mutating so that many new kinds of plants and animals were created, many of them very different from the life before the mutation. Then, the remaining humans banded together to create the United Commonwealth in an attempt to rebuild the world. Malencia “Cia” Vale, the protagonist of the story, is a sixteen-year-old girl from Five Lakes Colony, one of the smallest colonies so far with only nine hundred people. She, along with three others from the graduating class of fourteen people–Tomas, who was a close friend of hers until they drifted apart, Zandri, and Malachi– is chosen for the Testing, a test that will allow the best and brightest to progress to the University and continue their schooling to become the nation’s future leaders. This should be a time for her to rejoice, as she feels that it will make her father, who passed the Testing, proud, but instead, her father warns her to trust no one, because the test isn’t just what it seems. While his memory of the testing was wiped, he explains, he often has nightmares about what happened during the Testing, and he believes that the Test isn’t just a paper-and-pen test, because in his nightmares, he sees the world blowing up and people who seem to be his friends, who entered the Testing with him, being killed. Cia tries to follow his advice, but as the book progresses, it seems like her childhood friend, Tomas, may be among the ones she shouldn’t trust, and she has to choose whether she can trust him or not. I really liked the book, especially because the book is really focused on actual, academic knowledge, something that wasn’t in the Hunger Games or Divergent trilogies. I would recommend it to anyone who likes dystopian stories and rate it 9.8/10.
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