#read instead battle royale
Short version: After a mysterious virus wipes out the entire adult population on earth, 12-year-old Lisa assumes leadership of the children in her city. She sets up a well-running system of government that can let everyone survive, if she can outsmart rival gangs, starvation, and the ever-present weight of responsibility.
What I thought: The graphic did a lot of things right. The art was great, the research for how to survive in an urban post-apocalyptic world was thorough.
However. What wasn’t all that thorough was a decent understanding of how people work. Lisa’s great for her situation, she’s resourceful and strong and fearless, but the problem is that she is like that all the time. Her vocabulary and her tone of voice are those of a calm adult, not a twelve-year-old girl who just lost her parents and most of the people she knows, and watched her childhood home burn to the ground. Alongside her is a team of preteens and precocious youngsters who also have that same mind, who casually throw around words like “retire” and “Molotov cocktail.”
Alongside these weirdly adult kids you have the antagonist, the leader of the nearest rival gang, Tom. Poor Tom. He acts and speaks way more like you’d expect a kid to do, all the way down to how he responds to authority figures and how he mimics them once he is in a position of authority himself. It’s implied that he was beaten quite a bit when his father was around, which makes some of his motivation clearer, but falls too easily into the old trap of “kid gets hit and thinks it’s okay to hit others” which is sometimes true but really ignores that the kid is a human, not a trained animal. Also in Tom’s corner: he has half his face burnt off by Lisa’s team as they defend their fortress from his gang.
When he eventually does invade and take over her fortress, her solution is to just talk calmly and rationally to him, point out that “stealing is wrong” (totally ignoring multiple counts of attempted murder from both teams), and ask him nicely to leave. Tom, with his bully persona and face-related grudge and the clear winner of the skirmish, rolls over and quietly walks away.
Sorry,what? Who the hell would dothat? Did the author just get squeamish at the idea that he had set these kids up to kill each other, and chicken out at the last minute because the thought was too unsettling? That’s where the line is? He could kill off everyone over twelve in the world, but the kids are not to kill each other? Good thing he didn’t try to go for anything too difficult, like “kids mourning their families” or “diabetic kids run out of insulin” or “What’s sex and what are these weird hairs under my arm?”
Very frustrating. You want a story of survival, where the children must make Sophie’s Choices in order to see another sunrise? There’s plenty to pick from.
Read instead: Lord of the Flies by Jim Golding, Battle Royale by Kashoun Takami, Children of the Corn by Stephen King, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.
