Love-Hate

Mutually Assured Destruction. From the mind of the Land. Really. And I am not buying it. The Land wouldn’t use terms associated with Earth, no matter the contact with the Clearing. Of course I am talking about the book Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness. His Chaos Walking trilogy is great, and I am happy that I stole the first one from J.R. Wagner after a Toastmasters International meeting a few weeks ago. Immediately hooked, energized actually, enough to want to write, to want to create.

Patrick created characters I liked, that made sense, in a way. Then the envelope began to stretch, right at the end of Book 1. Book 2 had the envelope bursting at the seams, but I still love the story, the characters (the two main characters), but Ness began to weave his political world view into the story. I know, I am to ignore that, to put it out of my head, like I did when reading The Dome by Stephen King (also stolen from Josh). And for the most part, I managed.

Book Three made this difficult, especially when he began to tell the story from 1017’s point of view. This, in and of itself, wasn’t a bad thing. I wanted to learn about the natives of the New World, but it (so far, I began this post as soon as I read MAD) just confuses things. Maybe this is because feelings are confusing, but I tend to think Mr. Ness is trying to justify the violent nature of the Land by making the Clearing worse than they really are. 1017 should have by now forgiven Todd, not held the grudge this long. It just makes the coming epiphany that much more predictable.

All Clearing did not enslave the Land…

Okay. I am going back in, trying hard to remove 2012 political ideals out of it, but if he makes one more good character ‘kill’ based on erroneous emotions, then filling that character with guilt, I might not be able to finish.