Reviews with content warning for Death - The Testing

(All page numbers are from the Paperback Edition)

Wow. I have so many thoughts and feelings about this one, but the overwhelming one is disappointment. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the book. There's a lot in here that's engaging and surprising and easy to enjoy. I gave it three stars! But wow, am I disappointed.

A little context for this review: I've got a bit of history with this book. I first read it as a preteen, right after it came out, and I was definitely the target audience; I absolutely loved it the first time. For several years, the book remained in the back of my mind, rarely thought of, until 2017 when a discussion with a friend prompted me to seek it out and reread it to see if it was as good as I remembered, and at the time I thought it held up pretty well. Now that I'm an adult and have a little more experience of my own with writing and critical reading, I've been wanting to come back to this book once again and see if my opinions have changed (and oh boy have they), plus I want to finish the series. So that's what I'm doing.

Okay, let's get into it. *pulls up extensive liveblogging notes*

What I loved:
- The world (at first): I really enjoyed the worldbuilding at the beginning of the story. I was invested in Cia's family, the traditions and lifestyle of her hometown, her father's contributions to the community, and her desire to follow in her father's footsteps, to be part of something bigger than herself and help fix the world. I really liked the society's use of color to represent various ages in the colony. I liked the characterization of the colony as a place where everyone has different skills but they all work hard and they all have something to offer. I liked the various societal cues or pressures we got glimpses of, like their expectations of humility and obedience and service from Cia, and their sense of collectivism over individualism.
- The inciting incident: There is an event that occurs around the 30% mark that is just really great, from a story perspective. I'm a sucker for plots that set up high stakes early on but then take their sweet time, slowly amping up the tension, creating suspense and doubt, until suddenly something happens and you realize that everything you were afraid of is true, and maybe it's even worse than you thought. The Testing does this really well. It was the one thing I remembered clearly between the first and second time reading it.

The plot point of Ryme's suicide is absolutely fantastic. It's shocking, it's repulsive, it's devastating, and it's engaging. And unlike some other twists in the story, it actually feels earned. The build-up, with her corncakes, her barely masked insecurity, her constant attempts to undermine Cia. Their quick final fight, where Cia extends an olive branch and Ryme completely rejects it, and we leave the scene thinking it's ultimately inconsequential. The reveal of her death, which is only a paragraph but is full of details that I vividly remembered for years after my first reading: urine, a colorful dress, and scratches on her neck. And then the aftermath is done equally well. It's the first time we see the Testing's level of apathy to death, their complete disregard for the students' lives. It becomes even more clear when Cia realizes there were cameras watching Ryme as she prepared to kill herself: the Testing could've stopped it and saved her life, and they chose not to. It's the events preceding and following this scene that make us really start to realize exactly what kind of place this is.

- Tests 2 and 3: Once you suspend your disbelief of the logic in this world (see below) and just embrace the Testing for what it is, the second and third tests are extremely engaging. I'd say pages 65-202 are the strongest part of the book, but the absolute highlight is 103-133.

The second task does a great job of taking the newly established high stakes from Ryme's death and raising them even higher, leading to an action-packed 30 pages. They're facing difficult practical exams, students are getting injured, sick, or even killed, and anyone who asks for help is eliminated too. But this is overshadowed by the best sequence in the book, test three. I absolutely love these few pages, definitely my favorite part of the book. The design of the test itself, their approach to solving it, Roman's trickery and all the signs of it, Annalise's disappearance, Cia's slow realization of the truth, and the uncertainty of how Brick will react are all awesome. Of all the eliminated candidates, Annalise is definitely the one I feel the worst for. And both the hints of Will's similar behavior and the relationship between Cia and Brick are both nice bits of foreshadowing. Just a great sequence all around.

What I hated:
Small potatoes:
- Tomas' introduction: I don't feel like this is a spoiler because it's so obvious from the beginning, and that's my complaint. When Cia introduces the other three candidates who have been selected for the Testing, she says, "Shy but sweet Malachi...beautiful artistic Zandri...gray-eyed handsome Tomas." Gee. I wonder who the love interest will be. I hate when books do this. Don't tell me that the love interest is handsome, don't tell me that I should like them just because they're designed to be attractive to the protagonist. Show me that they're an actual person and let me grow to care about them. Literally on the next page she says Tomas is the smartest in their class; why not introduce him like that? "Kind Tomas, top of our class," makes me want to know more. "Gray-eyed, handsome" just makes me tune out because I want to make my own decisions about which characters I like.
- Names: There is much more to say about the worldbuilding in this book, but at the moment I just want to focus on the names. Not of the people, but of various aspects of the larger world. They are so, so, so boring. Beware, the following contains something far worse than spoilers: a rant. Click at your own risk:

At first I thought it wouldn't bother me; the testing process is called The Testing, the university is called The University, the country is called the United Commonwealth, but is it really that important? But it just. kept. happening! The most egregious example of this is on page 81. Cia answers historical questions on a test, and we learn that four of the large political groups during the final war were called, wait for it, The Asian Alliance, The Mideast Coalition, The North American Alliance, and The South American Coalition. I just about lost my mind when I read that. Believe me, I know it's not that deep. But as a poli sci and international relations enthusiast....excuse me??? Do you know any words to describe an intergovernmental organization other than Alliance and Coalition? Do you realize that there are thousands of IGOs around the world that are founded on shared principles other than geography, the least uniting trait I can think of??? In the real world, we have the UN, the Arab League, the G20, NATO, the EU, NAFTA, OPEC, etc., all groups with far more interesting names founded on a variety of uniting principles like demography, history, linguistics, religion, economics, and political ideology. This is ridiculous. Try harder, be better.

Yeah. Some of these names are so bad, it's insulting.
- The Seven Stages: Not to be dramatic but if I have to read "The first four stages where humanity fought each other and then the three stages where the world fought back", or any iteration of it one more time, I'll kill myself.
-

If Michal is with Cia at the start of the fourth test, who is with Zandri and Tomas? Are they alone? Are they with Testing officials? Are the candidates taken in a staggered order so the escorts can be there for each of their students, and then drugged different amounts so they all wake up at the same time? Why doesn't Cia ask this? It makes no sense that she wouldn't, given her past behavior, and it would be really easy to just put an explanation here.

"The love interest gets a serious leg wound that the protagonist doesn't know how to treat" is so Hunger Games. So is "forced to squeeze pus from an infected wound."

What happened to Nicolette? Maybe I just missed it but I feel like every other character got at least a mention of what happened to them but Nicolette just never came back from the final task and Cia never wonders what happened to her?

Medium potatoes:
-Unearned plot twists: As I mentioned above, there are several points where a big reveal is delayed for no reason other than because the plot demands it, to surprise the reader at the "best" moment. I absolutely hate this tactic, it's cheap and it's lazy and it tells me the story can't stand on its own so the author had to throw in an artificial barrier to keep things interesting. Instead of creating suspense or drawing me in, as I'm sure it was intended, it made me detach from the story, because it was so so obvious that the text was trying to manipulate me. It made the eventual reveal meaningless, boring even, because I knew it should've happened 25 pages earlier. There are three specific examples of this I can recall. The first is

the news that Cia was selected for the Testing. This was only delayed by a few pages, but it was so unnecessary and transparent. It was clearly just a double fake-out, "Oh you thought she would be selected? Psych! Psych again!" It just made me annoyed from the start

. The second is

Tomas' continued refusal to tell Cia why he has a problem with Will (and Cia's inability to figure it out). Tomas is clearly suspicious after the third test, we see him frowning at Will as Zandri is getting agitated, and I assumed he had put it together and would tell Cia what Will did. But then he didn't so I assumed I was wrong and he didn't figure it out. But then, they meet Will in the fourth test and Tomas is suspicious! So I guess he did? But he says basically nothing to Cia to explain why? And it gets even worse, because then, Tomas gets left with Will and something happens, and instead of telling Cia about it which he has every reason to do, he just keeps it a secret for no reason?? It is so so contrived. And the fact that Cia doesn't put the pieces together on her own is also astoundingly contrived, since she has been consistently characterized as being observant, paranoid, and suspicious about everyone and everything, yet somehow she doesn't figure out what happened with Will and she lets Tomas get away with just not telling her about it for days on end??? Absolutely nonsensical

. The third is

the reveal of Zandri's bracelet. This one made me so mad. At this point I was just waiting for the book to be over because I knew all the best parts were past, and then this happened. The lamest Chekhov's gun I've ever read. Cia is looking for stuff to light a fire and finds a bracelet from another candidate. She knows that something happened between Will, Tomas, and another candidate; she thinks Tomas might've hurt someone because of what Will said, because Tomas is lying, and because there's blood on his knife. She's established a pattern of observant and paranoid behavior. But does she look at the bracelet? No, because that would spoil the reveal. It would ruin the exchange between Cia and Dr. Barnes when she asks what happened to Zandri, and then finds the bracelet and puts it all together. It would mean we don't get maximum shock value, and apparently that matters more in this story that consistent character decisions. From the moment she chose not to look at the bracelet for literally no reason, I knew it would be coming back at the "right" moment and I spent every page after seething, waiting for it to reappear. Completely removed any impact that moment was supposed to have.

I hate that there isn't a clear answer or even a strongly implied one, of what happens to the candidates who aren't killed by the tests but still fail out. Obviously we are supposed to assume they're dead but I can't believe that no one in the story ever asks anyone in charge what happens to the 80% who fail, if they survived the tests. The closest anyone comes to discussing it are extremely vague statements in Cia's thoughts like, "We all knew we didn't want that" and "[insert side character] would not be coming back." If everyone is assuming failed candidates died, as Cia strongly implies, then why is there no exploration of what this means for Will or Nicolette? You're telling me Will believes his twin brother was killed for not doing well enough on a test, that Nicolette believes her cousin was killed for seeking medical treatment, and this has 0 impact on either of them for the rest of the Testing? I don't buy it for a second and it's ridiculous that we're simultaneously asked to believe that everyone here believes the candidates die when they fail and that close family/friends of the failed would be unaffected by the murders of their loved ones.

The fourth test is by far the weakest section of the book, which is unfortunate because it's also the longest. First, let's talk plausibility. What on earth does any of this have to do with their stated goal of making the world a better place? There's nothing they will prove about knowledge, skill, or innate ability here that they haven't already proven in the tests, and the rest is just luck and speed. How does not dying of thirst or avoiding wild animals make them a good leader? It doesn't. It's basically just a Hunger Games ripoff, a blatant excuse to put the characters in a life or death situation where anything can happen at any moment.

- Tomas: I just don't care about him or his relationship with Cia. I can't even bring myself to write much about because I literally don't care. But it's medium potatoes because clearly the book wants me to care so it's a problem that I don't.

Big potatoes:
-

The Testing itself, the premise of the book, makes 0 logical sense. There is no reason whatsoever why a struggling nation with limited resources and a small population would kill 80% of their best and brightest. Surely you would want to maximize the amount of intelligent qualified people in your country. Just let whoever fails go back to their lives. Saying they do it to weed out the weak is BS. Killing people for seeking medical attention or not getting enough points on an exam? Killing 80% of your smartest citizens?? No. I don't buy it. It makes the whole thing feel a bit removed from reality and difficult to take completely seriously. We're given a bit of an "explanation" on page 144, except it's literally not. It doesn't clear anything up. And what could possibly be the benefit of encouraging backstabbing and ruthlessness? Do you want leaders who are only thinking of themselves and how to get ahead, who will sacrifice their people to save themselves?? Obviously not. All of this just serves to the make the book more "thrilling" but it doesn't hold up under much scrutiny.

Even if there was some sort of twisted logical rationale for why one person, like Dr. Barnes, believes this is good, it makes no sense this rationale would be widely adopted and implemented for years and decades. It would be easy enough to ignore this if the Testing had something to say, if the Testing were an allegory created so the author could levy her critiques at modern society, like the Hunger Games. But it doesn't really have anything to say beyond, "Government can be corrupt" and "Killing is bad."

The characters in this book all suck. Zandri was interesting at the beginning but quickly lost her rebellious spark and did nothing interesting. Ryme was interesting before she died. Malachi never got a personality before his death. Couldn't tell you a thing about Nicolette or Boyd; they're both dead too. Michal has no agency, he's just there to like Cia for no reason and give her whatever she needs at any given time. Tomas also has little agency, just a flat good guy who is attractive, kind, smart, and always on Cia's side no matter what (except when the plot demands he isn't). And then we have Cia, our perfect protagonist. Name a flaw of Cia's, I dare you; every trait you could possibly think of, she's the perfect middle ground. She's empathetic and kind but never lets emotions get in the way of reason. She's tenacious and hard-working but never to the point of arrogance or working herself too hard. She's cautious but doesn't doubt herself or get in her own way. She's observant and suspicious but never jumps to the wrong conclusion. She's pragmatic, brings all the right clothes, packs her bag, can shoot and start a fire, saves food even though she doesn't know why, and by the end she must be the most prepared candidate in the history of the Testing. She has no flaws, and that makes her boring. By the end I just wanted her to mess up in a way that actually mattered in the long run. We want characters with moral conundrums, who mess up and suffer serious consequences for it. We want characters who are human, who we can relate to. Cia is unrelatable. That's why Will is the most interesting character for most of the book, losing his brother and making questionable decisions from pretty early on. For a while he was definitely the best character. But even he is ruined by his "cartoon evil villain" speech at the end of the fourth test; I could almost see him with an evil grin, pacing and cackling as he explains his evil plan and gives Cia time to shoot him. That was so cliche and stupid. Damn it. This is why we can't have nice things.

I really really struggled with how to rate this book. On the one hand, I've read this book three or four times now. And except for this last time, each reading experience was thoroughly positive. Clearly there is something in here that has value, for me to keep coming back to it over and over again. But on the other hand....there is so much to critique. I was really disappointed to come back to this book I've loved and find it so lacking on a number of fronts. I eventually decided to bump it up from 2 stars for two reasons: 1) because there are a few specific things that this book does right and are worthy of praise, and 2) at 21, I'm no longer the intended audience, but when I was the intended audience, I loved it.

Content Warnings