The Scorpion Rules (Prisoners of Peace)

This book was like id-fic for me. So many elements from my dreams– and nightmares. It’s an Omelas-type dystopia- a world where the good of the many depends on the suffering of the few. In this case, the few are the children of 25th century world leaders, who are kept hostage throughout their childhood (or as long as their parents are in power) to ensure that their parents don’t start wars. If their parents do, the children are killed. Greta Gustafsen Stuart, our narrator, believes in the system even though it keeps her as a hostage at risk of death. She has a strong sense of dignity, both as a person and in terms of her position as a “Child of Peace”. Elian, a new arrival at the monastery-like residence of the hostages, has an entirely different idea of dignity. He’s defiant in the face of what he sees as an unjust system, comparing himself to Spartacus, and while the children’s robotic minders go to extreme lengths– even torture– to get him to comply, he continues to rebel until it becomes clear that he’s not the only one who’ll suffer if he keeps it up. In another author’s hands, Elian would be the love interest, but while they kiss a few times and grow close over the course of the novel, Greta’s major romantic relationship is with her (female) roommate, Xie. Greta is slow to question the system, but she eventually sees the wrongness of her captors’ treatment of Elian– and then they turn on her, too. Ironically, it’s while she’s being tortured with the induced nightmares of “Dreamlock” that the residence is invaded by Elian’s people, who have figured out a way to declare war without sacrificing their hostage. The country they’ve declared war on is Greta’s, and they will stop at nothing to use her against her family. Oh, did I mention that this whole hostage system is run by an AI? Talis, the AI, is not happy with the hostage-taking of the hostages. He arrives to sort things out. The trouble is that his idea of sorting things out often involves killing people and destroying entire cities. I don’t want to summarize the entire plot, but hopefully that gives you an idea of how much you’d like this book. One of its great strengths (it’s written by an ex-physicist) is how well-thought out the AI’s and the technology are– and they become increasingly important as the plot goes on. I normally loathe stories where a person “uploads their mind,” because they fail to take into account that the lack of continuity between the consciousness in the body and the consciousness in the copy, but a few books do it well (Peter Dickinson’s Eva springs to mind). This book doesn’t address all my concerns, but it explores the concept in more interesting ways than most do, I wish the geopolitics had that same depth– while the cast is diverse (Xie is Asian and Elian is Jewish and “racially indeterminate, like many Americans”), I didn’t feel that the future countries from which the hostages besides Greta and Elian, who are both North American, come were that plausible or textured. Another weakness is that sometimes concepts are introduced out of nowhere when they become necessary, like “dreamlock,” which was introduced so abruptly that it didn’t feel like an organic part of the world. However, the strengths more than outweigh the weaknesses. I stayed up till two to see what happened next in this tension-filled story. Erin Bow isn’t afraid to go dark, hard places (and I’m not talking about the violence, but about Greta’s choice at the end and its fallout). Furthermore, characters on all sides of the conflicts have depth and pride, have standards below which they will not sink, even if those standards are very different from person to person. Greta is a great heroine. I love people who can see past their own self-interest, and while she’s not exactly right when she believes in the hostage system, she’s also noble. I loved her, and I hope she narrates the companion novel, due out next year, as well. A nonspoilery standout moment in terms of emotion was Greta’s mother’s insistence that Greta not be painted in her monastic Child-of-Peace outfit, because she wants one picture of her not dressed as “Joan of bloody Arc!” And you know it’s because Greta might well die in her role as a Child of Peace, and her mother wants some reminder that’s not connected to the hostage system. I am waiting on tenterhooks for the sequel. Next year can’t come fast enough. Review also here:[...]

Now I am admittedly WAY behind jumping on the fan train for this fabulous book, (the sequel just came out if that tells you how behind I am LOL) but this in no way lessens my love for it. First off (since I’m doing this for #BiWeek in the first place) let’s talk about the bisexual rep. Hell, the fact that it HAS bisexual rep is huge in the first place. There are books out there with bi protags, but it’s definitely taken a while for them to gain momentum and visibility, and even then, SFF is slow to catch up with the contemporary fic numbers. Granted, I don’t believe THE SCORPION RULES explicitly used the word “bisexual” (or if it did, I blinked & missed it), which is a little disappointing, but it still had a bi main character which matters so much to the young!me who never really understood being bisexual was even an option until after college because I never saw it on paper in any of the (many and varied) books that I read. Better yet, Greta’s sexuality is taken simply as a matter of course. She’s bi in the book, but the book isn’t about her being bi if that makes sense. Who she’s attracted to is all about who those individuals are, not what their gender is. It was honestly refreshing to read a book where the character doesn’t struggle with her own sexual identity and instead just accepts it and moves on. There is definitely value to “discovering identity &/or coming out” stories, but it was nice to have bisexuality delivered without any angst (well, the book has LOTS of angst & heartbreak, just not about Greta’s sexuality LOL). So yeah, it’s definitely on my list of books to rec for anyone looking for bisexuality in a SFF book. But really, it’s on my list of books to rec period. This was such a fascinating world for me. Historically, hostage children were fostered fairly regularly prior to the modern age we’re in, but we don’t often seen that addressed in anything but historical novels. This is one of the first I’ve seen do it in YA sci-fi, and I just love the concept of this politically fraught landscape and the stressors placed on the hostage children, who might in another series have been the spoiled royals the reader loves to hate. It was also a very interesting mix of heavy duty technological details mixed with the almost bucolic setting of the Prefecture where the hostage children are forced to live and work. And, I know several other reviews have mentioned it, but as someone who grew up on a ranch with aggravating goats: seriously spot on rural details there! Goats in a tree will never cease to be the most annoying and befuddling thing to have to try to deal with during daily chores LOL. Finally, y’all, an AI rules the world. As a girl who grew up with the Terminator and still loves all of the reboots, the Skynet parallels were fantastic. Really what more do you want? By the way, I do feel I need to leave some trigger warnings here. This is a book about war: as “quiet” of a book as it starts out to be, you have to know it’s going to get darker and darker as the book goes on. The children are captives waiting for death, and that death can’t be avoided for some of them. Also, there is explicit, on page torture and some truly gruesome hand injuries (which HOW DO I KEEP FINDING AMAZING BOOKS THAT GIVE ME HAND INJURY NIGHTMARES??) so if either of those will cause issues for it, read very carefully and be prepared to set the book down if you need to. But yeah, I really did love this book. I’m buying the sequel, THE SWAN RIDERS, just as soon as reach my goal of getting 15 books off the TBR mountain prior to purchasing anything else (good lord the mountain has gotten out of hand, y’all – I’ve GOT to find more reading time in my days LOL). It sounds just as good as this first book was, so I’m super excited to get my hands on it!

The book starts with an original and interesting idea. We are introduced to a dystopian scenario where, after a past set of events that we do not witness but we are told that almost caused the annihilation of humanity, peace is finally achieved by the intervention of an extremely sophisticated artificial intelligence(AI) being, who keeps order in the world through fear. With the help of some other inferior, but efficient AI creatures and machines, this being keeps the children of the world's rulers as hostages in a forced labour/study camp situated in a remote area of Saskatchewan, Canada. All of this lasts until the hostages reach their 18th birthday, when, if they are still alive, they are sent home to work on their political career. If before that age, their countries declare war to each other, the children of the rulers involved are immediately killed by an angel/demon who arrives at the camp riding his or her horse among clouds of dust. The kids are fully aware of the situation, and deal with their fear of death, sense of pride and social responsibility in different ways, depending on their character and status (some rulers are more powerful than others). The protagonist is a 16 years old girl of high lineage, who tells us the story from her perspective. An interesting start, but unfortunately, once the stage is set, the plot then develops without a good flow. It looses steam and purpose and sometimes becomes just a literary pastiche. In addition, politically correct lesbian sex with no steam and no real purpose, is thrown into the plot when it really does not need to be brought into the picture. Parents/educators may find it inappropriate, teens may find it, if not inappropriate, just predictable and boring. There was really no need for sex in this story. Finally, the great ruler of the world, the supreme AI being that you have been hearing about from the first page, when finally comes into the picture, leaves you quite unimpressed . The finale is not grand, and you are left hanging in there, with no real burning desire for a sequel. Altogether disappointing.

This book is a personal drama, it is a dystopian landscape, it is a political commentary, it is a technological warning. It is all these things while being only one thing. I'm not an overly emotional person, and overly emotional books just annoy me. This i hope provides the context to signify the magnitude of the following: i read most of the middle third of this book with tears in my eyes. The book is written with such brilliant understatement that i had no choice to feel what the characters were feeling, because the author perfectly showed it without ever saying it. Upon finishing this book, i first had to sit a while and just digest what i'd read. Then, i got up and ordered the other books written by this author so far, because they simply must be at least partly as good as this one, and partly as good as this one still edges on brilliant.

This dystopia starts out with promise but degrades into some very painful scenes that I found difficult to stomach. In a post-apocolyptic world, earth is controlled by humanoid robots -- and one in particular called Talis who began as a human but turned himself into an Artificial Intelligence. On earth after a nuclear holocaust, America has become a collection of warring kingdoms and fiefdoms. Talis has imposed a rule on the kingdoms of earth. They must each give up a royal child to be held as a hostage. If they go to war, the child dies. If the child lives to be 18, he or she goes back home and becomes the next ruler as soon as they have had their own child. The children are held somewhere in the Canadian plain where they run a little farm and are tended to, educated and punished and occasionally abused by a bunch of robots. Greta, the protagonist, accepts the system without questioning it -- and even the probability of her own death -- until Elian arrives. He's the grandson of a new, upstart kingdom about to go to war with her own, and he accepts nothing and is viciously tortured as a result. I thought we were heading for a kind of teen uprising and romance sort of story -- and we do get some of that -- but it heads in another direction altogether. The plot the author has devised includes scenes of sadism and torture graphically described and also psychological terror. There is an uplifting message about the power of love but you have to plow through some deeply upsetting scenes to access it. If you do not like the idea of young people being abused and tortured and do not enjoy reading about violence, I suggest this book is probably not for you.

The Scorpion Rules is the first in Erin Bow’s Children of Peace YA series. In Bow’s world, peace is maintained by an AI named Talis who forces each country’s leaders to provide a child or grandchild as a Child of Peace - if the country enters a war, the hostage is killed. The book centres around a young princess named Greta, whose orderly world as a hostage is shaken by the arrival of a new Child of Peace, Elian. Elian is new to the hostage system and struggles to adapt. Things escalate when Greta’s and Elian’s countries declare war. I really loved the concept and worldbuilding in this book. I found the idea of the Children of Peace to be intriguing and well written. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel the same way about the human characters, especially Greta whom I found to be very bland and irritating. It is kind of a problem when the artificial intelligence is more interesting than the humans. Think Siri with the world’s nuclear codes. It’s fair to say though that the events of the book have changed Greta and she promises to be more interesting in future books. I gave The Scorpion Rules four stars out of five.

oh man oh man this book tore me apart. beautifully and poetically written, vivid and realistic characters, just absolutely wonderful all around im not even sure if i want to read the next one in the series bc this one ended so well though i would love to read more of this authors stuff

I loved this even though sci fi isn't usually my thing. I was totally delighted by the unexpected bisexual love triangle and by how that turned out, and I found the premise ethical dilemmas faced by Greta totally fascinating. Reading the ending on an airplane was definitely a mistake though.

This is a book for all seasons, and all readers. Labelled as a young adult novel, it echoes in the heart of even this refugee reader from the 20th century. I loved it.

I have had this on my TBR list for a while, so when I had the chance to get it, I did. I am upset to say that I was sorely disappointed and DNFed this book at 10%. The premise looked so promising and it just fell flat on its face. There was no world building!! I feel like I was thrown into this unknown world, with only a very short explanation of what happened to actually get there and why they ended up there and that was it. There was just nothing - I was expected to understand something that never stemmed from my own imagination. What year are we in? Not even that was clear, all I know is that is 400 years on from the war that led the characters to where they are now - not even the year the war took place was obvious. It just made no sense. Goats. I am pretty sure the author has a thing for goats because the description of them was top notch. She could write a goat story and it’d be pretty interesting, I think. Plus, how the heck does a goat get stuck in a tree? seriously?? Pretty clever goat. Also, I am pretty sure that if a goat jumps onto your shoulder after being stuck in a tree, he isn’t going to land lightly - as depicted in the book! I know that I only got 10% of the way in, but I didn’t feel anything for the characters. I felt nothing. I didn’t care that there was a constant threat to their lives if their parents didn’t play fair; I didn’t care that it isn’t fair that they are the children of peace because of a war that happened 400 years ago; I didn’t care whether they stayed in that situation forever or whether they did something about it! I think my lack of investment in the lives of the characters didn’t help. Any reader needs to feel something for the characters, otherwise the book will never be considered interesting. This book was also pretty slow paced. It was really easy to put my kindle down to go and do something else. That something else turned out to be the housework. Yup, I traded in a book for cleaning - it can’t get any worse!! As any normal person, I have no problem procrastinating the housework - but I didn’t want to!! Hoovering my entire flat was more appealing than reading this book!! Can I just say, is WW1 really that interesting that they are still learning about it at least 500 years on from when it happened?? I think it was bad enough that I had to learn about it every year in school until I left Sixth Form, as well as WW2 - if the children 500 years from now are still going to be learning about it… well, lets just say have fun!!! I think it is a real shame that this book fell flat on its face because the premise was so promising. It was slow paced and boring. I gave this book 1/5 stars.

Quick Thoughts 1. This might be more of a 3.5 star review but I'm undecided still. 2. I love the idea of this book but so far it's being executed a little weirdly. The plot felt a little confusing sometimes due to not having a full explanation. 3. I'm iffy on the romance in this book. Was there or wasn't there a love triangle? Did she even pick someone? I felt like Greta was always kissing one or the other sometimes right in front of everyone. It was very strange. 4. I think the only thing really saving this book right now is the idea. It's kind of cool how the AIs rule the world. The ending of this book didn't really give you much of a clue for what's going to happen next. Is Greta going to rule the world or make it a better place? Who knows. 5. I didn't really connect with the characters that much. It made it a lot harder to get through. Is it weird that Talis was my favourite? Bonus: this book takes place in Canada!! Full review on <a href="https://bftreviews.wordpress.com/">Book for Thought</a>

If you liked the Hunger Games, you'll enjoy The Scorpion Rules. Beautifully written. Touching, witty, and thought provoking, all in good measure.

Chapter one: great. Chapter two until the middle of the book: really nothing worth mentioning happens. Then there's a blip of action, but by then I didn't even care about the characters anymore, so any attempt to draw me in until the end of the book fell flat. It seems like the author would've rather written about simple life on a farm full of children than anything. The sci-fi elements seem forced into the story and the stakes and goals of the main character don't really seem worth it. I honestly feel like the ending could've happened around the half way mark. Nothing that happens in the second half of the book was really necessary, since it doesn't really solve a lot of the plot in the second half. I typically read sci-fi and fantasy and so I was excited for this, especially because the premise sounded so interesting, but I ended up frustrated with this read.