I have been avoiding my literary responsibilities, and so, the next few posts with have rather approximate finish dates as I immediately lent out this book and life got RIGHT in the way! I'll be honest about this one though, I picked it up because it's pretty. That copper foil cover and lovely damask print got me good. I bought it because it's focused around tattoos and in my experience, that is one subject that seems permanently tarred with a negative brush. Mentions of tattoos in novels tend to run toward the rebellious - bikers, angry youth, punks and skin heads... So much of the history of tattoos is wrapped up beautifully in a rich tapestry of ritual, from Polynesian islands, traditional Maori and Samoan culture, the woad-wearing Picts also decorated with scarification, to Japan, the Samurai and the modern Japanese mafia. Modern day tattooing among the general population of my part of the world is not something explored in fiction in a particularly accurate way. I know that with a YA Fiction novel I'm taking a chance on something that could be terrible as it does have a tendency to be a bit trite or cliche but sometimes you've got to run that risk to find the good stuff! I didn't realise when I started reading this book that it was based off the authors experiences with Evangelical Christianity, which makes the progression of the story so easy to understand. ![]() Title: Ink Author: Alice Broadway Published: 2016 Genre: Fantasy/Young Adult Pages: 366 Finish Date: 20/06/2017 This book is a gentle introduction to questioning your surroundings and being critical of the society that's built up around you. In the same vein you've probably seen in dystopian novels over the last few years, it's a narrative that rubs it's shoulders against the likes of Divergent, The Hunger Games and The Maze Runner. At first it all comes across as creepily cheerful. Leora is blissfully unaware of how her culture has come into being and seems pretty happy unquestioning the mystery of it, considering the entire premise of everything she knows has come from a rather absurd fairy tale that seems very much out of place. As far as protagonists go, she's typical of the genre. Bland enough for the reader to imagine themselves instead, essentially oblivious enough to allow for a thorough exploration of the society at large as it changes and certainly capable of many things but choosing to be a passive participant in her own story for the most part, until she makes a few choices that leave her backed into a corner.
There's a strangeness to the way the community treats its dead and when I mention the general community I mean that the scope of the story never widens beyond the town lines except to mention the "blanks" beyond the wall. It's a walled in community of people who wear literally everything on their sleeves - tattoos are given from birth - your name, age as you grow, schooling, job choice, marriage, children, misdeeds and broken laws... everything that happens to you goes directly on your skin, so your entire life is right there to be seen by everyone. The author gives us a neat little fairy tale to explain away this madness, which always picques my interest. The way that morals, ethics and societal standards have always been passed down in fairy tales, stories, fireside gossip or entertainment, bardic efforts - these are endlessly fascinating to me and this tactic has been used strangely withing the confines of Ink. It seems a little fanciful given the stark nature of the overall tone. What really got me reading greedily at first was the way that death features. Upon death, ones body is flayed. Yes. You read right. Flayed. The skin is completely removed and turned into a book. Everything else is cremated, and your weird skin book is given to a council of "readers" who go through it, assessing your life based on your marks and weigh up whether your life is worthy of being remembered. It's a very Egyptian weighing of the soul ideology that seems so out of place is a walled off community born of a fairytale. The basic idea is that the so called blanks are dangerous because they do not wear their lives on their skin and are basically untrustworthy because you're unable to tell who they are or where they have been and that they are hiding everything about themselves - are you feeling this Big Brother, nanny state type vibe yet? Leora's father dies at the very beginning of the book, this is the catalyst through which she discovers that there are many things she doesn't know about her society. With the appearance of a public marking ceremony of a criminal whose head is shaved and marked with the image of crows - marking him as unworthy of remembrance after his death - this unlocks memories long buried. This marking of crows signifies a pretty despicable criminal and although they are allowed to hide this mark under their hairline for the rest of their lives, so that others will forget and they can continue to live in society at large, they are effectively stripped of an after-life. Those marked with crows will have their skin book destroyed and are not allowed to be remembered or spoken of again. As far as punishments go it's pretty final and fairly messed up. Eventually Leora discovers that her fathers skin-book is removed from public display during the weighing and judgement period and she begins to piece things together, suspecting that her fathers book has been edited - an act worthy of the crow mark. There is of course, a love interest, a mysterious boy who seems to know more than he's letting on and immediately has some sort of shine on her, after all, this is a book for young adults... Will my taste in books ever grow up? I mean, yes, this isn't the only sort of thing I read, if you've been following the blog. Though I have recently decided that Wuthering Heights is something I need to read and that's proving to be a rather more difficult book to get through than I expected. Having said that, in terms of rating Ink, I think I'd give it a six of ten. It was interesting, it was different, but it was also a bit same-y and gently riddled with holes as far as plot and motivation goes. A strange one, but definitely something I'd recommend to teen audiences.
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