The 100

Posted On May 12, 2015

The 100
by Kass Morgan

I found the premise of this book intriguing. Nuclear war has taken place on Earth and a colony of people have lived in spaceships orbiting Earth for 300 years while waiting for the radiation to calm down so they can repopulate. After some tests, scientists believe that the planet is safe, but who is willing to actually go test it out? The government decides to send 100 prisoners that were sentenced to die with bracelets attached to them that sends data back to the ship. If they can survive, then the rest of the population will follow.

For reasons that are not explained very well, most of the ship’s prisoners are young adults. If anyone slips up past the age of 18, they are sentenced to prison and more often than not, death. It seems odd that a ship with limited resources would keep killing all the young people instead of possibly the old and sick. Maybe that is explained in more details in future novels, but not in this one and that is the main problem. This is a young adult novel that follows in the recent trend of writing everything in a trilogy format. The way this very slim book was written, I sense that it was a normal-length novel that was cut up into three of them to sell more copies. It feels incomplete, especially since the entire book is explaining some of the backstory and getting the kids down to Earth. Barely anything happens though and then the book ends on a cliffhanger. While I have no problems with books ending on a cliffhanger, there still has to be some semblance of a story. I appreciate a middle, beginning and end. This is all beginning with a hint at a middle coming up. In other trilogies or even book series with more than three novels, something still happens in each book. They can stand on their own. This book cannot stand on its own because there is no main plot.

I might have forgiven some of this but the writing was very poor. Each chapter concentrates on one of four main characters, none who are fully developed as characters, but instead are archetypes. Each chapter covers a tiny bit about what is happening in the present before it goes to some flashback in the past. I love when books tell the history of what has happened to characters, but when a book spends so much time in flashbacks and no time in the present, I feel like it could have been arranged in a better manner. The way it is organized doesn’t work. If there is a point where you might be interested in what is happening in the past or present, it doesn’t last long before the chapter ends and it is time to move on. The chapters are extremely short and so much more could have been expanded on that wasn’t, which leads me back to the poor writing. I have defended some popular young adult novels that are extremely well written, but this is not one of them.

I would not recommend this book, and I know it was written in a way that would make you want to continue reading the series to wrap up the cliffhanger, but I was completely annoyed by nothing happening the entire time. I will not be reading any more.

Grade: D