B
Genre: Romance, Science Fiction/Fantasy, Young Adult
This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by am harmon. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the YA Romance category.
The summary:
It takes guts to deliberately mutilate your hand while operating a blister-pack sealing machine, but all I had going for me was guts.
Sol Le Coeur is a Smudge—a night dweller in an America rigidly divided between people who wake, live, and work during the hours of darkness and those known as Rays who live and work during daylight. Impulsive, passionate, and brave, Sol deliberately injures herself in order to gain admission to a hospital, where she plans to kidnap her newborn niece—a Ray—in order to bring the baby to visit her dying grandfather. By violating the day-night curfew, Sol is committing a serious crime, and when the kidnap attempt goes awry it starts a chain of events that will put Sol in mortal danger, uncover a government conspiracy to manipulate the Smudge population, and throw her together with D’Arcy Benoît, the Ray medical apprentice who first treats her, then helps her outrun the authorities—and with whom she is fated to fall impossibly and irrevocably in love.
Set in a vivid alternate reality and peopled with complex, deeply human characters on both sides of the day-night divide, Plus One is a brilliantly imagined drama of individual liberty and civil rights—and a compelling, rapid-fire romantic adventure story.
Here is a.m. harmon's review:
Plus One is a YA novel, and, as such, it comes with all the problems that make many books of that genre unappealing to adults like me. It is plot driven at the expense of character development or world building. The dialogue can be awkward and unrealistic. The themes are simplistic and obvious. The reader sees the surprises coming at least five chapters before the characters do. The protagonist makes tons of mistakes with no consequences, and the conflicts are resolved just a little too easily. There is even some cringe-worthy love poetry.
I still enjoyed the hell out of it.
Elizabeth Fama’s third young adult novel is set in an alternate-reality, dystopian (Are you sick of dystopias yet? If not, you must not spend your days around teenagers) Illinois with a premise I admit I’ve never seen before: the world is divided into “Rays” who can only come out during the day and “Smudges” who can only roam at night. At first I thought this was just kind of…weird, but the more I thought about it, the more it made sense as a social critique. The poor working class is literally required to stay invisible to the rich — to disappear into the night.
Our protagonist, sixteen-year-old Smudge Soliel “Sol” Le Coeur, is angry at everyone: at the government, who destined her to a life of darkness and mindless factory work, at her brother, who abandoned the family without looking back, and at the universe in general, which is taking the only person she cares about, her grandfather and guardian, “Poppu.”
So Sol decides to kidnap her newborn niece, with the thought that holding her can be the last bit of happiness Poppu experiences before he dies and without realizing that stealing an hours-old infant is a ridiculous plan even by ideas-thought-up-by-teenagers standards (FYI, if you’re one of those people who gets anxious about the proper way to hold newborns, this book is going to leave you feeling very tense.). But Sol soon stumbles into problems bigger than her own when she mistakenly picks up an important government official’s baby from her brother’s hospital basket. As she is on the run from the law, she uncovers many schemes and counter-schemes by both her corrupt government and its revolutionaries, some including the involvement of her own family.
Our love interest comes in the form of a Ray hospital intern named D’Arcy. At first, of course, they hate each other. She thinks he’s some stuck-up rich boy who represents everything missing from her own life; he thinks she’s a juvenile delinquent. But they gradually begin to understand each other and realize they share a (suuuuuuper obvious) past secret.
In addition, they are both descendants of French-speaking immigrants, which is…possible I guess. I don’t know; are there really that many Francophiles in Chicago? At first I thought the influence of French language and culture was going to play into the dystopian history somehow, but, no, it seems to mostly just be a vehicle for some out-of-place French-food porn that is completely at odds with the story’s sci-fi-lite tone. Seriously, every time Sol is panicking about the latest plot device, some side character is there to insist that she must first sit down for crusty bread! with pesto! and Brie! and champagne!
Sol and D’Arcy’s love scenes are pretty sparse and mostly crammed into the middle of the book, where the plot just kind of stops so they can go off into the wilderness and be romantic together. Fama keeps it all pretty school-library safe, with only one — tame and vaguely described– sex scene.
So with all that said, I would still give this book a “B” rating. Why? Well, the part that counts in a YA book – the plot – was overall pretty tight and engaging (that’s not to say perfect). I originally sat down with the goal of reading for one hour and ended doing four, so I can’t in all fairness judge it too harshly.
In addition, Sol is an interesting and relatable protagonist. Her anger feels very real and palpable, but both the reader and the author know when it is justified and when it is misplaced. She is a sympathetic character without being a perfect one.
Overall, Plus One is good at being what it is. Ten years ago, I would have loved this book. As it is now, I still enjoyed it more than the last dystopian YA novel I read.
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