About the Book
-
Author:
- Jill Tew
- Genres:
- Boy-Girl Romance
- Dystopia
- Science Fiction
- Voices:
- Black
- Cis Boy
- Cis Girl
- Multiracial
- Straight
Cover Story: City Meets Country, But Make It Scifi
BFF Charms: Yay, Eventually
Talky Talk: Cardboard Cut-Out
Bonus Factors: Found Family, Technology
Anti-Bonus Factor: Dubious Consent
Relationship Status: Swiping Left
Content Warning: The Dividing Sky features scenes of drug use, drug abuse, and severe withdrawal.
Cover Story: City Meets Country, But Make It Scifi
There’s a lot going on with this cover, from the pixelated cityscape and the figures holding hands under the full moon to the starry female figure and the shadowy male one. It goes well with the story, but is a tad too busy for my taste.
The Deal:
Liv Newman lives in a future America where a corporation, LifeCorp, has taken control of the major cities from Atlanta to New York, creating a large area called the Metro. She’s a Lower, most of whom spend their lives doing double or triple shifts in factories. But she has a special position in their world: she’s an EmoProxy, or someone who records their feelings and emotions to sell to Uppers, whose lives are lived in a constant, controlled state of productivity.
When Liv is offered the payment of a lifetime, she’s more than willing to leave the safety of the Metro and travel into the Otherlands, raiders and danger be damned. But there’s someone on her tail, and he’s fully drunk the LifeCorp Kool-Aid … or so they both think.
BFF Charm: Yay, Eventually
Liv is a headstrong, rule-skirting young woman who’s had to do some questionable things to make ends meet and to keep her family with their heads above water. She doesn’t love selling Scraps—the snippets of emotion and experience she records—to Uppers, but it’s a far better job than making VitaBars all day. She’s willing to take risks, both with her safety and with her heart, but needs to believe in herself as much as she believes in others. I’d be her friend in a heartbeat.
Adrian is a rule-following LifeCorp enforcer who believes fully that what the corporation is doing for the Metro is for the benefit of all. He begins to question his reality pretty early in the book, thanks to his initial run-in with Liv, but he holds onto the only life he’s ever known for a good while. I’d totally be his friend after he gets his head out of his butt, but not at the start.
Swoonworthy Scale: 4
Liv and Adrian initially meet when he’s undercover and she’s running from the law. So, obviously, the two are destined for each other.
Talky Talk: Cardboard Cut-Out
Tew’s writing is reminiscent of dystopian novels of old, in ways that are both good and bad. Good, in the way that it causes a lot of nostalgia, and not so good because it doesn’t do anything new for the genre. Liv and Adrian are great, well-rounded characters with a lot of depth, but the villains of the story, both the specific people and the larger LifeCorp monster, with their shallow motives and mustache-twirling vibes, fall flat. The world-building is a bit lacking, too, with only a bit of background knowledge to flesh out this future America.
Bonus Factor: Found Family
In the Metro, parents are given six months of leave to bond with their children. But if they want to go back to work after those six months, they can drop their babies off to be raised by an arm of LifeCorp that treats them as little better than employees. Liv got out of the system at age eight, thanks to a complex man who’s both a father figure and local crime kingpin Silas; he also saved a few other kids, and together they’ve formed a family whose bonds are obviously stronger than blood. (Silas’s reasons for saving all of them are suspect, as at least two of them have to take part in shakedowns for “protection fees,” but Liv, particularly, can’t forget that he saved her life.)
Bonus Factor: Technology
Although Tew doesn’t really explain the Proxy technology, other than “it just works,” it’s a fascinating idea for a dystopian society run by a corporation. Productivity is God in the Metro, but humans are humans, and even the most robotic of us needs outside stimuli from time to time. I don’t love the idea of needing a RelaProxy to keep my marriage alive while I work, but experiencing a wide variety of emotions thanks to an EmoProxy is an idea I might be able to get behind.
Anti-Bonus Factor: Dubious Consent
While in the Outlands, Liv decides to cut herself off from the Metro for a time as a sort of reset. What she doesn’t realize is that the decision will leave her with what basically amounts to a case of amnesia, and a personality that hasn’t been tempered and/or effected by her rough upbringing. Adrian takes advantage of that, even though he tries not to, and I found myself side-eyeing his self-reassurance that the Liv he gets to know outside of the Metro is the real her.
Relationship Status:
We had a fun adventure, Book, but I’d much rather live in a world that (supposedly) allows folks to have a work-life balance. You also hit a teeny bit too close to home, and I wasn’t looking to be reminded of how we humans have lost our way.
Literary Matchmaking
Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games wasn’t the first dystopian YA series, but it’s one of the best.
Astrid Scholte’s The Vanishing Deep is another dystopian novel about discovering truth.
Son M. and Robin Yao’s graphic novel, Thief of the Heights, is also about a society divided into the haves and have-nots.
FTC Full Disclosure: I bought a copy of this book with my own money and got neither a private dance party with Tom Hiddleston nor money in exchange for this review. The Dividing Sky is available now.
