52 in my 2011 book blogging challenge.
America Pacifica is yet another disappointment. It’s the tale of a young woman living in an apocalyptic, dystopian world in which North America has been frozen out by an ice age, and a group of refugees has built up a society on a volcanic island somewhere out in the Pacific. It came across to me as a book that was trying too hard to be another Hunger Games, but it didn’t quite make the grade.
This is why it doesn’t work for me. The writing style is good. The story idea is good. The characters are interesting. It has a lot of potential. The plot, however, is just not well developed, not for a book of this nature.
I find that very disappointing. I wish Anna North would get together with her fellow Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduate, Justin Cronin, and find a happy medium. His book, The Passage, is far and away better than America Pacifica. I look forward to reading the sequel to it, and I doubt I will touch the sequel to this one. However, I thought he overdeveloped his plot line to the point of near tedium. Now I find this writer from the same graduate program who seemed to forget she even needed a plot halfway through the book. I give up. I don’t know what they are teaching people in Iowa these days.
Nonetheless, I think America Pacifica is too rushed to hold together. Some plot twists just aren’t even believable because they haven’t been set up enough. There’s a reason most books that create fantasy worlds are epically long. It takes time to build that kind of world and to establish the foundations of a believable story within it. Anna North just did not take that time with this book.
If you liked The Hunger Games, you might like this book, but I wouldn’t make any promises. Maybe I’m just being a crabby reader this week. Maybe what didn’t strike me as interesting will strike you. Regardless, my assessment stands that Anna North should have worked on this one some more before she went to print. It could have been a lot better than it was.
