The Culling(The Torch Keeper)Publisher: Flux, 2013Genre: YA DystopiaLucian “Lucky” Spark has been recruited for training by the totalitarian government known as The Establishment. According to Establishment rules, if a recruit fails any level of the violent training competitions, a family member is brutally killed . . . and the recruit has to choose which one.
As the five recruits form uneasy alliances in the hellish wasteland that is the training ground, an undeniable attraction develops between Lucky and the rebellious Digory Tycho. But the rules of the training ensure that only one will survive—the strongest recruits receive accolades, wealth, and power while the weakest receive death.
With Cole—Lucky’s four-year-old brother—being held as “incentive,” Lucky must marshal all his skills and use his wits to keep himself alive, no matter what the cost.
Lucian’s little brother, Cole, calls
him Lucky which is sort of ironic in the world they live in. But Lucian still
does whatever is in his power to keep Cole happy, and innocent and believing in
things like faery tales. Then, after a bad turn of fate, Lucian is betrayed and
drafted to participate in The Recruitment. He will have to do everything in his
power to win the trials that await him if he hopes to see his brother again. But
winning the trials would mean eliminating all competition, including bad boy
Digory Tycho. If only Lucian could deny his feelings for Digory.
Steven Dos Santo’s The
Culling is gritty, scary, gory, and gruesome. Yet amid it all there's friendship and love and romance. I love it!
Lucian
was a great character to meet. He starts out weak and naïve, and when the
horrible stuff starts happening he doesn’t crumble, but rises to the challenge.
He’s also a very kind and caring person. I think this is what attracted Digory
from the start. Their romance is slow and shy, like a burning ember just
waiting for the right wind to ignite it. I found myself sighing out loud in a
couple of scenes, that’s how good the romance was.
However, the world they live in is
horrible. It’s filthy, dangerous, the mortality rate is at forty, and the
Establishment is cruel. Much like in the Hunger Games, The Establishment has
The Recruitment in which they select a group of five people to undergo
participate in a set of trials. But that’s where the similarities stop. The
world of The Culling is vicious, and Steven Dos Santos pulls no punches
when describing just how gruesome it is. It might be just me being squeamish,
but I thought the horror was sometimes too much. The looser of each trial has
to choose between his two Incentives (people the recruit loves) and kill him or
her. And I’m not talking about a bullet through the brain. No, that would be
too merciful. The horrors that happened every time one of the recruits lost
truly made my skin shiver. Add insult to injury, and the winner of the trials
has to continue on their training to become an Imposer (the elite guard),
essentially working for the people who made him do all the horrible stuff in
the trials.
I think part of what made this more
shocking than The Hunger Games is the
fact that we get to know the Recruits on a personal level. Ophelia the sweet
and cheery but scary as hell girl. Cypress the thought girl with a soft heart.
Gideon the guy with some deep issues who’s nice. And Digory whose kindnesses
towards Lucky won me over from the minute he appeared on the page. We get to
care about these people…And then we have to watch them kill their loved ones,
and suffer, and ultimately die! When you have to think, “Well, at least they
died in a gas chamber,” you know things are seriously f-up.
The ending was epic on so many levels.
It was fast paced—well most of the book is anyways—it was full of action,
deception, and heartbreak. Steven Dos Santos left a lot of things to work on
for the next book, like what happened to Digory, and what are the Fleshers, and
how will Lucian rebel. Seriously. There better be a next book.
*Arc copy
provided by the publisher via Netgalley*
Favorite Quotes:
~Whitewash
Procedure~
The lights in the Battle Zone dim.
Initiating
whitewash procedure.
At
Slade’s command, a panel opens in the simulated sky. Hundreds of small,
steam-powered spherical drones, no more than two feet in diameter, swoosh
through the opening like angry hornets. They swarm across the battlefield over
the remaining survivors, spewing them with a substance from stinger-like
cylinders jutting from their surfaces.
Only their venom isn’t some poisonous
toxin. Whatever the substance makes contact with begins to sizzle and melt
away.
Acid.
The entire chamber fills with the
screams of people being melted alive.
