Series: Insiders #1
Author: Maria V. Snyder
Goodreads Av. Rating: 3.93
My Rating: 2
I’m Trella. I’m a scrub. A nobody. One of thousands who work the lower levels, keeping Inside clean for the Uppers. I just do my job and try to avoid the Population Control Police, who dream of recycling scrubs into fertiliser. So what if I occasionally use the pipes to sneak around the Upper levels?It’s not like it’s dangerous… Well, turns out it is. Because I know every corridor, pipe and shortcut I’ve become the go-to girl to lead a revolution. I know if we find a gateway to Outside it’ll be suicide plain and simple. But guess who likes a challenge? I should have just said no…
I am a big fan of Maria V. Snyder's other works, which became a contributing factor to why I decided to give Inside Out a try. Such a large amount of hype and positive reviews surronded this book, but honestly I felt like it was a very poor read.
Dystopians are a very hard genre to write, though Snyder's ability to create world's in her other books, made me hopeful that she would be much more successful with this book, than she had.
Comparing Inside Out to other Dystopian novels, I believed this 'new world' was very under developed, no history is provided, no myths and barely any information of how they live now, is given. Multiple times I questioned the way these people are expected to live in this world, trapped basically in a building. People can not live without natural light properly, food can not be grown properly in unnatural light, how are animals surviving, where is water coming from and most importantly where is this never ending supply of metal coming from? These are the type of things I believe need an explanation behind them. The setting just wasn't believable.
The world is split into Upper level citizens, and Lower level citizens, otherwise known as Scrubs. I felt like this society based on Capitalist values, which considering the apparent and rather failed equality was unrealistic. The Upper levels have basically given up all the control over to the 'Trava' family, which lead to the Upper levels being treated as slaves despite their high status.
The main reason I did not like this book, was due to main character: 'Trella'. Main character's are meant to be lovable and definitely likable, by the reader. But Trella is portrayed as a very cold character, who reader's do not feel any type of connection with. Also Snyder's attempt to add Trella as being a victim of isolation and verbal abuse, in a way to get the character's to like her, though really I felt like Trella believed she was better than herself, despite the attempts of denying it.
The main story interested me, another factor which made me want to read the book. Though I felt like too much was happening at once, but nothing appeared to be leading anywhere. In the end everything got a bit too confusing, that it would take about 10 times reading the book to manage to get your head around the book.
It was only at about 60% that I thought the book got a slightly bit interesting, but this did not stay the same for long.
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