The latest novel by the creator of the world famous Divergent series, Carve the Mark is the first novel of Roth’s new series.
Book title: Carve the Mark
Author: Veronica Roth
Reviewed by: Saniyah Eman
The latest novel by the creator of the world famous Divergent series, Carve the Mark is the first novel of Roth’s new series. Classified as a Sci-Fi young adult novel, the story revolves around two people from the enemy nations of the planet Thuvhe who meet by various odd turns of fate and end up together despite many odds; Cyra Noavek, the daughter of the leader of the Shotet nation, and Akos Kereseth, who is abducted as a child from the Thuvesit nation. He ends up as Cyra’s servant when he is sixteen. They live in a world that survives by the current, a mysterious force that flows through space and people, bestowing amazing gifts right, left and center.
Carve the Mark is about how Cyra and Akos learn to trust, and in time, (and extremely tentatively) love each other. While Cyra tries to free herself from the rule of her brother, Ryzek, who uses her for her current gift (which, incidentally, is to transfer her own pain into other people), Akos (whose current gift is to stop the very current from flowing which is why he ends up with Cyra in the first place, in order to relieve her from the constant pain she’s in) tries to rescue his brother Eijeh, who was abducted by him. Of course, the story finishes with a huge cliffhanger that quite reminds me of R.L. Stein, who did his cliff hangers mainly for the sake of their being cliffhangers.
Now, I’ll warn you; if you’re thinking that except these names, the others are Tom, Wilkins and Harry, they’re not. If you want to read this book, get ready for names like Ylira, Orieve, Isae, Jorek, Kuzar and many, many more. The names of every single thing are so alien-like that all through the first half, mostly I just changed their pronunciation on every page trying to understand which one was right. Another thing you should probably be ready for? “A laundry list of characters” as rightfully described by another critic (a professional one, by the way,); there are many characters, and not half as much character description, resulting in your debating with yourself till the end of the book about the eye colour of one character and the hair colour of another. Third thing you should know before giving it a read is that the internet bashed Carve the Mark for being a racist and Able-ist book. What I think is that Carve the Mark is enough read once, and I’m not reading this hefty piece of fiction twice just to figure out where Roth might be referring to Africans in the description of Shotet and black slaves in some other unpronounceable nation.
Bottom line, it’s not a bad read, (well, not all that bad,) but if you expected something as brilliant as Divergent, Carve the Mark is so far from that mark that it’s disappointing.
