Book Review: The Selection
March 8, 2018
My thirteen year old niece recommended The Selection to me. I am beginning to go to her as a source of good book reading material because she also recommended the Water Fire Saga and I loved that series, too.
The Selection is a post-apocalyptic story where things aren’t as bad. The United States doesn’t exist anymore and four world wars have happened. The country that was formed instead of the United States is a monarchy, where the subjects are divided into castes. Each family is assigned a number and that describes your socio-economic status. The Ones are the rich, the eights are the poor.
When a prince is born, the monarchy creates a Selection, which is the process of choosing thirty five girls in a certain age range (16 to 20, I think, but I may be mistaken) to go live at the palace where they meet the prince. The prince, at the end of this Selection, will choose a wife.
The main character is a girl named America Singer. She is a Six, a musician. She is a pretty red head who has a secret love, who is one caste beneath her. As a Six, she is one of the poor, and since she is the right age at the time of the Selection, she applies (but only because many people told her she should).
America is chose and sent to live at the palace where she meets Prince Maxon only after her love, a boy named Aspen, breaks up with her.
At the palace America meets the other girls, some nice, some mean, and begins a friendship with the prince after he finds out she doesn’t care about the Selection and she offers to be her friend to help him find a wife.
The book is filled with conversations between the prince and America, which are just delightful.
It is a very predictable story, but a joy to read. It’s the journey, not the destination. In fact, the titles of the next books pretty much tell us what is going to happen.
I have reserved book two from my public library and can’t wait what will become of Maxon, America and Aspen (although I already know, but reading about it is going to be so much fun!)
cheers!
