Whew! I sure am glad that my internet browsing is anonymous and no one can track me down. Wait, it's not, and they can? Oh no! My personal data is at risk! Hackers are gonna steal my credit card information and use it to buy... I don't know, stuff I don't want. How can I protect myself while I'm browsing online? I know, I'll just use Atlas Boopin. Wait, it's pronounced VPN? But what does VPN even stand for? Atlas VPN is the best way to make your internet browsing safe and secure for almost no cost. It allows you to browse using an IP address from somewhere else, so the internet thinks you're in a different location. This allows you to keep your Google searches and other activities completely private.  Please follow the law at all times. It prevents companies from selling your data and helps keep malware and obnoxious advertisements at bay. Talk about two birds. Right now they're having a summer deal where you can get three years of Atlas VPN premium for just $1.83 a month. That's less than an order of McDonald's hash grounds for a whole month of protected browsing. You know what else you can do with a VPN? Watch region locked content on streaming services. Netflix is awesome everywhere except the US. So if I want to watch Dungeons & Dragons honor among thieves without paying for Paramount Plus, all I have to do is say I'm in Japan or one of the other not America countries and voila, I'm in. No need to buy 30 different streaming services just to watch the thing everyone is going to rave about for two weeks and then erase from their memories. Want to save even more money? Use Atlas VPN to get great deals on products that are cheaper in other places. Everything from Spotify to airline fees and hotel rooms can be cheaper. All you have to do is sign up. The summer deal ends soon so if you want to get three years of the greatest VPN this side of Valhalla for only $1.83 a month, click the link in the pinned comment below to get started. So you may have looked at the title of this video and thought that I was exaggerating, but I can assure you I am not. The Lorax, if you're unfamiliar, is an animated movie that is a loose adaptation of a Dr. Seuss book by the same name and it is about a world where all the trees got cut down and so there's no more air and people have to pay for it. And, well, Breathe, it took me too long to grab that Breathe by Sarah Croissant, is a dark and more serious version of that exact same setup. For what it's worth, this book came out seven months after the Lorax film did. Maybe it was inspired by it. Maybe it was developed independently. I'm not totally sure, but I'm going to refer to it as an edgy Lorax rip-off because I think that's really funny. And the setup for this story is that after an apocalypse, which is only ever called the Switch, Switch is capitalized by the way, we're not messing around.  And that air is not free, like you have to pay for it. Some people are premiums, which are upper class, rich people, they rule the pods. Then there are auxiliaries who are lower class. And again, they have to pay for all their air, like so much that most people barely even exercise. So they can't dance, they can barely kiss, they can't do most things that we take for granted nowadays. It's like the American healthcare system, only far simpler and less predatory. A couple of years ago, the YouTuber Sarah Z did a video on the rise and fall of weird young adult dystopias. And even she just mentioned this briefly as an example of that trend and she literally said, yeah, this is just the Lorax movie. And a lot of other people said that and a lot of other people poked fun at it for that. And I think I was less dismissive than most people were. Because sure, the idea of all the air going away and people having to pay for it, that's unrealistic, yeah. But it is making an actual point about society, which a lot of terrible YA dystopias did not do. Like in the real world, we have to pay for shelter, food, water, medicine, like things that we need to live. They aren't luxuries, these are things we need to live and we have to pay for them. And this is just adding one more resource to that list. Like if you feel uneasy or disgusted by having to pay for air, maybe you should also feel the same way about having to pay for those other things. You know, like it's an actual point. You know, it has an actual point which does put it above other entries in this genre. And that said, it's still pretty bad. Like I have both books here. You can see, this is the whole series, it's only two books. And it's bad, but I've read so much worse.  You know, it doesn't actually cause me pain. It's not bad because it's just ungodly long and stretched out the way Throne of Glass is. It's not horrifically boring like Leviathan was. It doesn't have an obnoxious Mary Sue protagonist like House of Night and Leviathan and Throne of Glass, if I'm being honest. And it doesn't push abhorrent beliefs that I just hate and disagree with like the way of the Shadow Wolves. And it's also not like Pariah where it's just gross. Like if you haven't seen my video on Pariah, check that out. That book is just gross. Breathe and its sequel, Resist, are bad, but they're just like regular level of bad. But before I get into the story, I want to tell you, hey, go to the pinned comment so you can sign up for one of these plushies. Look at the limited time only. We have a campaign going to make sure that they, you know, actually come out. Let's do it. Come on. Check out. Check out the campaign. Get a plushie. Do it now. Do it now. The rest of the video is not happening until you go down to the pinned comment. Go. Do it. Hurry up. So Breathe follows three POV characters. Later they add in a fourth one, but the first book, it's just three. Their names are Bee, Quinn, and Alina. And then the second book brings in another guy named Ronan. They all live in something which is just called the pod. Or, okay, I call it the pod. Sometimes the characters refer to it as just the pod. Its official name is Breathe. I'm not calling it that because that's weird. Breathe is a verb. It's not a noun. Stop calling things verbs. It's confusing. And like I said, the pod is a giant dome which is just sealed off from the outside and people there all breathe in artificial oxygen. And Alina is a rebel which is fighting against the ministry and the ministry is the ruling government of the pod.  So he's a rich kid. His dad is a general in the army and he, in fact, I believe he runs the entire armed forces of the pod. Except he doesn't actually know his dad is a general at first. We'll get to that later. And Bee is Quinn's friend, but she is a poor auxiliary. And also she's in love with him. And they all wind up after a series of events. It's not a series of events. We'll get to it.  It's not good, it's not good, but we'll get into the specifics later. That's what you're here for. I don't know how long this video is at right now, but it's probably pretty long. So let me get some positives out of the way before we really start tearing into this. I do like that it's only two books long. You know, like this story is a bit stretched out, but it could have been stretched out way, way more. And since trilogies were really king at the time that this series came out, I don't know exactly why it was only two books, but I am grateful that it's only two books. It is written somewhat competently, like the prose is mostly okay. There are still plenty of weird or bad lines in there, but it's not that bad. I've read much worse. Overall, the world is not good.  But there are parts of it which do feel very real and very lived in. You know, I did get a sense that a lot of the things in this world, especially in the pod, are really old and starting to fall apart. I also thought that the covers were kind of neat. You know, the first one you have like the giant dome, and you can see the wasteland outside it and there's some characters just standing there. But then in the second one you can still see the dome, but now it's full of greenery and the wasteland is also starting to have plants grow. And it's healing almost. You're seeing progression. And I just, I don't know. I kind of liked that. I like when covers in a series are actually connected with one another instead of, here's this cool thing. Here's this cool thing. This one actually shows some progression. I liked that. And I will say that the ending of this series hit a lot harder than I thought it would. It's not amazing, but I did actually feel some things at the end of this. So that's, that's, you know, maybe I'm damning it with faint praise there, but I did kind of like the ending. There are so many problems we can get into, though. Like the science for starters is absolute nonsense. From start to finish, just absolute nonsense. Like the idea of oxygen disappearing is just ridiculous. And I'll go into more detail about all the specifics of that later, but like just the very setup for the story is ridiculous. It's nonsense. It's not a thing. Okay, that's not going to happen. This is not plausible. None of the POV characters have distinct narration, so I kept getting them confused. You know, I've said this a hundred times. I'll probably say it a hundred more. If you're going to have multiple first-person POV perspectives in your book, you probably shouldn't, but if you're going to, you have to go to great lengths to make them all sound different and distinct from one another. The Young World is one of the only examples of this being done well, because every character has a very, very distinct voice, and moreover, it's typed in a different font for every character. So just looking at the words, even not actually reading them, you can instantly tell who's a POV this chapter is supposed to be from. The rebellion against the evil government... Oh, spoiler alert, there's a rebellion against the evil government here. I bet you didn't see that coming. But the rebellion just wound up being way, way too easy here. Like the characters and everyone else just had... I don't know, they didn't have a difficult time doing it, and they really should have had a difficult time doing it. And most of the characters have little to no personality. Like, even the main characters, there's not much to say about them. There's a little bit I can say about them, but there's not that much to it. And the side characters have even less. Like, altogether the, like, eight or nine characters in this book that have something about them that defines them at least a little bit, altogether they make, like, one personality. It's not good. And later on in the story, these weird sexual assault subplots come in. It's... I didn't like it. I didn't care for it. I've seen that handled worse elsewhere, but I didn't care for it. Just, I don't know, overall, this series doesn't have, like, one or two big, glaring things that stand out and make me mad or upset the way a lot of really bad book series do. This is just a series of weird and dumb decisions. And it just left the entire book series feeling empty and dead with a couple of people running around insisting that nothing is wrong. Like, I don't know, it's like the literary version of Pueblo, Colorado. I hope all five people in my audience who actually understood that joke found it funny because I'm not cutting it out. These books are not nearly as bad as they could have been. Like, they could have been so much worse. So they were pretty easy to put up with. You know, I was able to get through them without giving myself a headache. I didn't have to force myself to get through it a lot. But a lot of really bad books are bad because they make, like, really, really bold, ridiculous, bad, dumb decisions. And this doesn't do anything bold.  It's not taking any risks. So there's just not that much to laugh at either. And, I don't know, let's get started. Spoilers ahead. Leave if you don't want spoilers. So we start off with Breathe. And the first page says that oxygen used to be the most abundant chemical elements on Earth before the switch. So right off the bat, we're just wrong. Like, the atmosphere currently in the real world is about 21% oxygen and it's over 70% nitrogen. So just like right off the bat, it's like, no, oxygen is not the most abundant thing on Earth. We're off to a great start here. This rivals RM Huffman and his insistence that dragons are real. So we start with part one, The Pod. And the first chapter is from the perspective of Alina, remember, the rebel who's fighting against the government. Breathing is a right, not a privilege, so I'm stealing it back. I'm nervous, but I'm not scared. This is the mission I've been training for. I'm ready to lead. Okay, that's almost a good opening. Like, it goes on a bit too long, but it almost works. Like, if you just cut off everything after I'm taking it back, like just the first line, breathing is a privilege, not a right, and I'm taking it back, then I think it would have worked because it just going on for a couple of sentences about how Alina is an awesome, cool rebel, it just makes it feel like it's trying a bit too hard, to be honest. So Alina is going on this deadly mission with another rebel whose name is Abel. And they are in the biosphere, which is the part of the pod full of plants, and it creates air. Like, they're there to steal clippings from the trees so that they can plant trees elsewhere and make their own air, which makes sense, that's fine. But later we hear that all of the air in the pod is made by machines, and here we have them saying that, oh, okay, most of the air is produced by these trees here. Like, none of this adds up. So the two of them infiltrates the biosphere by just pretending to be part of a tour group, which, okay, that makes sense, and they have very little time left to do their mission because the, and a voice comes over the intercom and it says, the biosphere is closing in five minutes. I don't know why a tour would be going on if they're closing that soon, but whatever, why can't your aunt and uncle do this? I already explained it once, I snap. They're in agriculture, and they don't get permits for this part of the biosphere. It's a little strange that they don't have access to the entire biosphere, but okay, whatever, it's a security protocol, we'll just roll with it. And overall, Abel is nervous, but they do go through with the mission. Like, he throws a rock as a distraction, he accidentally hits a tourist in the head, and the tourist cries out verbatim, I've been hit, I've been shot! Which is not how people act when they've just been hitting the head with a rock, but okay. And Abel is mostly worried about not getting caught, like he's thinking, oh, shit, that person, we might get caught if that person keeps going, instead of worrying about almost killing someone, because like, he wasn't aiming for them, he was just trying to make noise and distract people. But whatever, they do make a distraction. Alina runs into a restricted section, and she mentions that most auxiliary's can't run like her because they can't afford to pay for extra oxygen. But her and Abel have spent a lot of time in alleyways, out in the pod, training and trying to get in shape, which does not make sense. Like, I believe that the alleyways would be out of sights of like, security cameras and like, police patrols and stuff like that. So that part makes sense, but I don't believe that no one would notice extra oxygen being used. Like it's mentioned specifically that the government monitors how much oxygen is used in houses, so they can tell if people are exercising or otherwise doing something they shouldn't be. And so they would probably measure how much is being used in the streets, too. Remember, this is all under a big dome. And later it's mentioned that people walk around the streets with oxygen masks, like even in zone one, which is like the rich area, which implies that air in the streets is really thin. So air in the alleyways should also be thin. None of this makes sense. So Alina does manage to steal the clippings. She doesn't get caught. She thinks about how she's in love with Abel for a bit, and then the first chapter ends. And honestly, that is an okay intro to the story. Like, if Alina was the protagonist, we could go on to the aftermath of the mission and then get into the main story from there, maybe explain more about her life and what it's like to live in the pod. But she's not the protagonist. So even if you get invested in what's happening at the beginning, you essentially have to restart the story, and now we go to chapter two, where we're learning about B. And this is a problem that comes back up again a lot in this series. Like, we'll have one character's storyline, which starts getting kinda good and kinda interesting, but then it switches over to another character doing something completely different, and it just takes you out of it and completely ruins the pacing. You are watching the thing, and then in the middle of the blood testing scene, it just suddenly cuts to the baseball scene from Twilight. Like, even if you enjoy the baseball scene from Twilight, it just ruins both to have them intercut together like that. So B is a student who is in class, and she's also with Quinn, who remembers the third POV character. And they're all in the middle of class having a debate with other students, and it's like a test, you know? Their professor and some others are just observing them. And if B does well on this test, she might get accepted into the leadership program, which could allow her to become a member of the ministry. And remember, she is very poor, so being able to make it up in the world is a pretty big deal for her. And the debate is about whether or not trees are essential. Several students say no, and then B says, actually, yes, trees are essential, because we need to breathe air. Like, it's just a way to try and make B look smart by comparing her to other people who are really, really dumb. So we find out that Quinn, as a premium, has a tattoo on his earlobe. Like, premiums are all identified by having a tattoo on their earlobe, which is an odd choice, because that seems like it would be easy to either not see it or it'd be really easy to fake it. Or it is confirmed that, yeah, it's really easy to fake a premium tattoo. So you'd think it would either be something much more visual and much more easy to see, like a tattoo on the back of their hands or their forehead or something to make it clear who they are, or not visual and just have it be like a chip under their skin or something, and they want to test if you're a premium, just scan it. Like, you'd think, but I guess not. Anyways, so they argue with the rich kids for a bit. The rich kids think the pot is paradise because, I don't know, reasons. And then it ends and Quinn invites Bea on a two-day camping trip and you're thinking, wait, this is the apocalypse and they camp? Yeah, like they just... Kids just go outside the pod and like pitch tents and go camping sometimes. That's just a thing that happens.  Like, there's no plants, obviously. There's no impressive sights that we hear about that they want to see. There's like no animals to go hunting if you're into hunting. Like, there's nothing out there. And so if there's anything that goes wrong, they die because, again, there's no oxygen and they need oxygen to live or humans we need to breathe and later, after this, we also learn that there are drifters out there which are people that were exiled from the pod for one crime or another and that drifters can be super violent.  Why would people allow their kids to go camping out there? It's not like Quinn is saying, oh, we're going to have to sneak out. Like, no, he just wants to go out and no one will stop him. That's like sending your kids to a sleepover at Michael Jackson's house. Like, do they do this for bragging rights? Like, to say, hey, man, I went on a camping trip, got into a fight with drifters and I survived. It's awesome. And if that's the case, then Quinn is acting very casually about it. Like, he's just inviting his friend along saying, like, yeah, it's a simple camping trip. And at the same time, people probably shouldn't allow teenagers to just go out like that. If that's the reason they're going out is to get into fights with homeless drifters. I don't know, man. I know I'm focusing on this a lot, but this is the inciting incident for the entire story. Is them going out to go camping or they're planning to go camping. It doesn't work out that way. This is the inciting incident for the entire story and it makes less sense than the lore for Elden Ring. Like, the only way I could see this working is if it was some sort of rite of passage that kids had to go through in order to be considered adults, you know? Like, they get thrown out for a week and if they survive the week, then they become adults. Like, at least then it would make sense why they're being put into this danger, you know? It just doesn't make sense as it is here. So anyways, Bea is not accepted into the pod leadership program and she's sad about that, but it never really comes back up in the story, so it doesn't mean that much. She is also in love with Quinn, but he doesn't notice. Because, again, her narration and Alina's narration are exactly the same, so let's make them sound even more similar by both pining after a guy who doesn't know they're in love with him. She goes home, tells her parents that she failed to get into the program. They're all poor and stuff. It's kind of sad, I guess. I don't know. They're poor, but it doesn't seem that awful. Honestly, they're a living situation. I mean, it doesn't seem that awful. Bea has also confirmed that the government monitors oxygen use in their apartments and apparently their taxes pay for a certain amount of oxygen, but if they use more than that, then they have to pay for that. Anything past that is charged. And I'm wondering, like, does a private company run this? There's no indication that a private company runs this. I don't know. And it's also mentioned by, excuse me, I was about to say Alina, Bea's mom, again, they blend together so much. It's mentioned by Bea's mom that they tie toddlers to their cribs so that they don't move around and use too much oxygen.   They just tie toddlers to their cribs. That's not okay. And her parents tell her, hey Bea, honey, baby, darling, you need to marry Quinn, not because you love him, but because he has money and he'll provide you with a good life. And she feels weird that her parents are telling her to marry Quinn, but she also, she is in love with Quinn, so it's fine, I guess. And you might think that this is like the beginning of a character arc or the beginning of some sort of subplot. And it's not. This goes nowhere. It could have been kind of interesting. You know, it could have been kind of neat. Maybe Bea could be wondering if she's like really in love with him or not, or if she's just fascinated by the idea of the life that she could have by marrying him. You know, like that could have been neat to see her try and figure out how exactly she really feels, but we get nothing like that. And finally, after that, we get our first Quinn chapter. And he's the worst POV character by a pretty big margin. Like I'll say right now, by the end of the series, I did like Bea a little bit. She's, for now, she's just bland, but over time, she did start to grow on me. Alina is just there. I don't have much to say about her either way. Quinn is the worst. Like he is just oblivious. His inner thoughts are annoying. He barely does anything worth praising throughout the whole series. He's just a dumb, spoiled, rich kid at the beginning.  He never becomes anything more than that. So Quinn is in line to get a vaccination with some other people. Apparently they actually get vaccinated a lot, like once a month for various diseases. And that actually does make sense because, you know, everyone's living in really close proximity. The air is recycled and shared a lot. Like disease would spread easy in that environment. So I can understand why they would want to make sure people are caught up on their shots. I don't know about all these vaccines. Sometimes I think it would be better to get one of these colorful diseases. I ramble on hoping I can keep her engaged.  Now, let's be clear. The vaccines here aren't harmful, but they also aren't vaccines. We find out later that they are designed to lower your red blood cell count, which makes people need higher oxygen levels to live. That way they don't go outside. They can't live outside. Because outside the pods, there is some oxygen. It's very low levels of oxygen. They say it's about 6% of the atmosphere. Since all the plants died, like they say all the plants died, but then they also act as if most of the plants died because they mentioned that the atmosphere is slowly healing. But it'll be, at least they think it'll be like many generations in the future before they can go outside. I don't know exactly. And we find out much later, spoiler alert, that you can actually train your body to live with less oxygen. So if you just live with progressively lower oxygen levels for a while, eventually you'll just get used to it. And then you can just walk outside without a mask. Like, yeah, you can just leave the pod. No mask, no suit, no nothing. You can just walk around and act totally normal, which is not at all how that works. Like, low oxygen levels in your blood leads to hypoxema, which is not a good thing to have, because symptoms include brain fog, headache, rapid heart rate, weakness, fainting, and death. And if you lived somehow, but you had really low oxygen levels for a long time, it would start to damage your organs, including your heart and your brain.  Now, you can get used to thinner atmosphere at higher elevations. In fact, I think that's what the author of this book heard about and just misunderstood it a lot. Like, if you go climbing on mountains or something, then as the air gets thinner, as you get higher up the mountains, you get tired more easily, your heart rate increases, you have to breathe more, you get winded more easily. But after a while, your body does create more red blood cells, and then you just get used to it. You know, like, I live at a very high elevation, and I've lived here most of my life, so it's pretty normal to me. But then, once I go to lower elevation at sea level or something, suddenly I need less oxygen, and I can just, like, I can run forever, and I can run way faster than I normally can. Like, it's really interesting. If you've never done that before, you should try it. However, your body adjusting like that does take time. And before that, you'll probably live unless you have other medical conditions or you go, like, way, way too high in the mountains, whether it's just not enough oxygen for you. But the air is just thinner. Like, the atmosphere is still about 21% oxygen. There's just less atmosphere altogether. And here's the thing. In this world, all the trees and other plants died. Like, I think they burned up, but it's not specifically said. Meaning that, and if there's... So they went from 21% oxygen to 6%. That 15% drop, that didn't just vanish in... I was about to say vanish into thin air. That oxygen didn't vanish into non-existence. It's probably carbon dioxide now.  Let's be clear. It would also raise the temperature of the planet by a fuckload. But we've established by now that none of this was thought through. Like, the outside world in this series is not mentioned a whole lot. Like, we get the pod, we get the general area around the pod. Not a lot outside that. Like, we do hear, though, that apparently in Russia, people trained to live outside and then they abandoned the pods and just lived outside normally. And we also learn later that the pod that this story mostly takes place in, the oxygen levels there are higher than normal. Which is, like, it's about 30% oxygen, they say. And that's bad for you too. Like, they say they are overfeeding them oxygen, as it were, in order to prevent them from getting used to thin air and being able to leave. But, again, having too much oxygen can also be bad for you. That can also damage your organs. And it's also a fire hazard. Because, again, they're in an enclosed space. Everything is tight next to each other. If a fire breaks out and there's more oxygen so the fire burns better, that's a bad thing. Things burn easy. What I'm saying overall is that if the environment was really as badly damaged as is described in the book, everything would be absolutely wrecked. Like, there would be no living outside the pod. And, hell, there wouldn't even be leaving it for long periods of time. Like, you would probably need protective suits and oxygen tanks. Like, it would be almost like a spaceship. But, in this book, it's supposed to be apocalyptic. The outside world is supposed to seem really horrible and harsh, but it honestly doesn't seem that bad when you take all of this into account. So, back with Quinn. All the girls that are nearby are throwing themselves at him because he's just so effortlessly hot and effortlessly cool. And he runs into Alina and sees her briefly and he thinks she's hot. And that's it. So, then we go to the next chapter, which is Alina's POB again. And she learns that Abel is missing. And there's no trace of him whatsoever. And she just says, okay, that means he's dead. Like, the ministry killed him and disappeared him. And Alina realizes like, okay, I need to leave immediately because they must have found him, found out about our mission. Who knows what information they got out of him before they killed him. It's not safe for me here anymore. I need to go outside and find Petra, who is the leader of a rebel cell, which is outside the pod. And then right after this, the news comes on and the news announces that they found Abel's body, found Abel's body while he was trying to destroy machinery.  That's what they say. And then they have an interview with the pod minister who is the guy in charge of the entire pod. End your message to the terrorist pod minister? To the terrorists I say, run, run. He looks straight into the camera and grins because a running citizen is an arrested citizen unless the runner is a premium with a tank, of course. And the journalist laughs too.  But I do not. I do not like the joke. This doesn't seem like a time for him to be joking, to be honest. Like for a dictator, or for any leader really, this is when you want to be hard and tough. Like they just caught somebody who they claim was planning a terrorist attack which could have killed a lot of people and they're saying like, hey, we got him, you're good, you're safe and it's all because of me. Like this is when they want to be hard and tough and spitting fire and saying we will come after you. You're with us or you're against us. We're going to run down the terrors, etc. That sort of thing. It's also a little strange that the ruling body is called the ministry and the leader is just called the minister. You know, you'd think there would be several ministers at the ministry. You know, minister of finance, minister of interior, minister of defense, etc. And the guy who's in charge of it all would be the prime minister. Like that's how most places do it. But okay, sure, whatever. And his name isn't given right now, he's just the pod minister but soon enough we find out that his name is Cain Navery. Attention everyone who is just listening to this while they do something else please look at the screen for a moment so you can see his name and how it's spelled.  Like you might as well just call him Evil McNasty, you know? This book series, it doesn't have a whole lot of stuff that's so dumb it's funny but it has a little bit of stuff that's so dumb it's funny. So we go to Quinn and he goes home and Cain Navery is there. Pod minister Cain Navery. I'm going to call him by his whole name every time because it's beautiful. And Cain Navery is just visiting Quinn's dad and like I said his dad is seemingly in charge of the pod's entire military but Quinn doesn't know that for whatever reason so for now he's just high up in the ministry like he's somebody important and Cain Navery and Quinn's dad are just talking to each other discussing important political stuff etc. And they're just drinking some whiskey and they give Quinn a little glass of whiskey too and he's 16 years old so that's not too weird to give him a little bit but they also give Quinn's 10 year old sibling's whiskey and that is a little weird. Like I get that this is a different culture and everything and in some places it's okay to give kids like a little sip of wine or something but whiskey seems really strong for 10 year olds. I don't know maybe that's just me. It's also hinted at at this stage that Cain Navery is an alcoholic or at least has a very serious drinking problem because he has a flask with him that he carries around all the time and he's constantly drinking from it and it's mentioned a bunch more throughout this whole book but it never really goes anywhere. So Quinn tries to convince Cain Navery and his dad to accept B into the leadership program and they don't and Quinn's dad calls B's parents subs which is apparently a slur for auxiliaries and honestly class-based slurs don't hit that hard. Like it makes him look like a dick, don't get me wrong but it doesn't feel like visceral, you know the way it would be if it was a slur based on like religion or ethnicity or something and I don't know it just makes Quinn's dad look like a dick it doesn't make him look like a sociopath the way you would expect from a high ranking member of a dictatorship, it just makes him root. So Alina flees her home she thinks about how she requested Abel be on the mission with her and then she thinks oh my god it's my fault I got him killed it's all my fault and this never comes back up like I'm gonna be saying that a lot in this book like I mentioned something and then it just never comes back up even if it could maybe have been interesting later on but whatever and then while she's running she meets a man in an alleyway and they have an interesting conversation he snickers and pulls out a short sharp blade I've run almost 20 blocks and hate to turn back but he'll cut me for sure so I turn around and run behind me he calls out I wasn't going to hurt a delicious thing like you come back my tasty what? I think the thin air in this world has given everyone in this book a mental illness like it's a very rare mental illness and it makes people talk like the bullies from anti-bullying PSAs that I had to watch in elementary school so Alina is fleeing the pod and she reaches border security at the same time as Quinn and Bee who remember they're going out camping she asks Quinn for help like Alina asks Quinn for help she's like hey I need to get smuggled through border security can you help me out and he again he saw her literally once and just thought she was hot and he agrees like he has no reason to agree to help her but he just does and he knows that she did something illegal and he knows that if he's caught he'll get in serious trouble but he just decides to help her anyways like he's supposed to be kind of naive and out of touch you know like he's a spoiled rich kid who doesn't really understand how the lower classes live and he doesn't understand how difficult this world is sometimes like that at least I think that's what this book is trying to do with his character but this just makes it seem like he's a borderline rebel already like he already hates the ministry and is trying to do everything in his power to stop them but that's not at all what the rest of him says like ask yourself you are crossing the border into another country maybe you're alone, maybe you're with some loved ones and as you're coming up to security a stranger who you think is attractive but they are still a stranger they come up and they ask you to help smuggle them across the border what would your reaction be most people would probably tell them to fuck off so Quinn makes a really big scene he pretends that Alina is his girlfriend and that she forgot her ID and he tells the guards to let her through because his dad is important he's like I don't want to have to run all the way back home it's important, let me through that's essentially what it comes down to and the border guards agree if he bribes them with some oxygen tanks and he agrees to give them the tanks like it's the one kind of nice thing that he does throughout the series and one of the guards though mentions that he doesn't have enough air to dance with his wife even which is really really stupid like if your soldiers and police and just security forces I guess they can care of you're gonna get overthrown like especially if it's a dictatorship like those guys should be swimming in air while all the peasants aren't even allowed to run or dance otherwise how can you be sure that they'll be willing to shoot the angry mob when it starts marching on the palace you know just cops in the US make six figures not even counting their benefits like that's how the government knows it can count on them to kill the peasants anyways the three of them escape the pod without any further trouble so we go to part two the outlands and they hike for a while with no clear goal in sight like Alina is obviously going off to meet Petra and the other rebels but there's why are the other two with her I don't know but there's hiking for a while and B becomes increasingly jealous of how Alina is prettier than her I feel Quinn away from her sorry my phone is vibrating a lot it's uncomfortable and based on that you might be afraid that a love triangle is gonna come up but no don't worry it doesn't emerge but it does make B look a little pathetic at this stage she just teamed up with a terrorist and that's what she's focusing on she's focusing on how the terrorist is pretty and might steal her boyfriend like girl there's more important shit to worry about and Quinn mentions that like they're talking about what weapons they have to protect themselves from drifters so like they know that this is a threat Quinn mentions he has one knife which he brought specifically to protect himself from drifters and he also mentions that they do have a hammer for their tent pegs which they can use if they need to so that's all they brought he didn't bring a gun he didn't bring a machete or an axe he didn't even bring a second knife for B he really really didn't think this through and that's even stranger because he's the child of a high-ranking member of the government which means he's like vulnerable to kidnapping or assassination or something like he should have some security with him like I feel like there should just be a bodyguard who tails him 24 hours of the day you know what I mean? and as they're hiking they're going through the ruins of some old city the specific city is never mentioned it's just an old city all the stuff near the pod is cleared so that's like just open wasteland but then they start going through like ruined buildings and such and Alina is leading the way again I have to ask why because they helped her they did her a solid they helped smuggle her through border security that makes sense and now she can go to the rebels I feel like they should just part ways now like they'd say okay we helped you we're gonna go camping now they are just with her they'll ride or die at this stage with Alina these characters are so generic I keep getting them mixed up but yeah, me and Quinn are just ride or die with Alina now for no reason whoops the author forgot that the characters need to have motivation to do things and not just get pushed around by the plot that's so easy to forget I mean I guess I shouldn't be sarcastic that is an easy thing to forget but really there is no reason for either me or Quinn to take this this route there's no reason for them to suddenly be okay with terrorism as they think of it and be okay with joining up with rebels like they just want to do that now like this is either remarkably lazy or remarkably clumsy writing it's almost impressive in a way so then we get Alina chapter and she gives some exposition about how the world ended it's a little better than I was expecting it to be but it's still not great, you know oxygen levels plummeted because all the trees and plants were dying people started dying from it because oh there's not enough air to breathe and then governments started building pods and rationing the air and they did manage to build the pods and save some people but in the end only some people could be saved only a few, a lot more died and the thing that caught me off guard though was that Alina's grandparents were there like they were not only alive during the switch but they were adults during the switch so this dystopia is only a few decades old the apocalypse wasn't that long ago and like I said this whole backstory of the apocalypse is not as bad as it could have been the author thought about it at least a little bit so it starts raining outside and remember all three of them are together and Alina goes into an abandoned house to escape the rain and she also wants to find a weapon because she didn't have time to bring one and she couldn't smuggle it through security so again it's raining and of these three people one goes inside to escape the rain and the others just wait outside for her instead of going in with her to also escape the rain so Alina strips down, she finds an old knife in the kitchen and then she hears a noise upstairs and goes to investigate and there's an old woman there and this woman attacks her trying to steal her oxygen tank and she doesn't manage to do it the others come in to help her and they subdue the old woman her name is Maude and she whines for a bit she talks about how she was exiled many years ago she's a drifter now and she was given this really big respirator which will create air for her so she wouldn't just die right away but it's really big and she's too old to carry it anymore so now she can't go around in the area and scavenge for food or anything and she's slowly dying and Alina and Quinn basically say oh it sucks to suck and then they want to leave her there but Bea decides to take her with them and this is when she started to grow on me a little she doesn't really have any motivation for wanting to help this lady other than being a good person and just knowing this is probably the right thing to do but you know at least she is doing the right thing when she has the opportunity so they keep moving for a while and then Quinn says this we've been walking for more than two hours and I think I've spent one hour looking at Alina's ass and another hour trying not to look at it I have to be careful though when Alina glances around not to let her see me staring okay? Quinn's POV his narration is at least a little different than the others you know he is a weirdo yes man so that's something I guess in fact most of the weird lines in these books there's not a whole lot of them but most of them are in Quinn's POV chapters so they all keep heading towards the rebel stronghold which is just called the Grove and Alina says it's built in an old soccer stadium and while they're traipsing through the ruined city a tank with some soldiers in it rolls nearby tanks aren't supposed to go anywhere alone actually especially not in urban environments I'm not sure why they sent this tank through in the first place maybe it was just a patrol but that's a stupid way to do it because again in any environment but especially in urban environments there are just a lot of places for ambushes it's very easy for somebody to just pop out with an RPG and then blow the tank away like life pro tip for anyone who's ever running a military operation tanks need infantry support or those tanks are gonna die but anyways the tank notices them and goes and talks to the soldiers for a bit and for whatever reason he runs like again he has no reason to like be afraid of the soldiers or to hate the pod or to join up with the rebels or anything but he really doesn't want to get taken home by the soldiers and he runs away and then they fire at the building he's in for a bit and it collapses on top of him okay that seems that seems excessive to me like it's one guy and they just fire a bunch of tank shells into this building which collapses it just to kill one day like do they also kill mice with land mines? the others all run though and they manage to escape through the old subway tunnels and then we have a bunch of rapid shifts back and forth between Quinn chapters and B chapters and every chapter is like one or two pages and B's parts are mostly sitting there thinking Quinn I'm so sad Quinn is dead I loved him Quinn's chapters are him sitting there thinking man I really wish I didn't get buried alive and eventually two people come by named Silas and Inger who are as Silas is Alina's cousin and he's also a rebel and they come by and they say part three the resistance I'm gonna stop announcing the new parts they really don't add much but you know there's parts in these books ooh so Alina B and Maude come across the tank again and the soldiers are still looking for them so they abandon the tank to search the ruins and then the girls jump in the tank steal it and drive off first of all it's not that easy to control a tank you need some training to be able to do it and secondly those soldiers are fucking dumb they're on the look for fugitives and they know they're nearby or at least think they're nearby and then they just leave their tank unguarded with the engine running like I don't know if tanks actually have keys like this is the equivalent of just leaving the keys in the ignition that's stupid and then Queen is traveling with Silas and Inger and he decides to say this you know those films where a guy wakes up next to some girl then creeps out of bed and kind of skulks off because he doesn't want to have an awkward conversation well it's not exactly the same thing but I have that awkward feeling when I wake up to Silas and Inger what the hell did you just say no I don't think I know what you're talking about there bro so then the three of them run from a higher military convoy which is shown up not just the one lone tank it's like tanks, APCs, helicopters that are all coming this direction for whatever reason and they try running from it and they are hiding in buildings but they have infrared vision so Silas tells them hey if we're gonna hide we have to get colder so they like I'll take their clothes off and start shivering and getting really cold which that is the exact opposite of what you're supposed to do if you're trying to hide from infrared vision like if your body temperature drops low enough to blend in with the environment you'll die like you will freeze to death if your body temperature actually gets that low you want to do the opposite you want to cover up and prevent heat from escaping so like for example during the occupation of Afghanistan the US and coalition forces had infrared cameras on drones and stuff from them the Taliban would just like lay out on a hot rock and then throw a blanket over themselves so that they couldn't be seen that easy secondly these tanks and helicopters should have used infrared earlier like they were looking for Quinn and them when they were just running from that one tank they should have used it then but okay and third how does the pod have this much military equipment because it's just it's described as if there's like dozens of tanks and helicopters but that requires a lot of resources and technical know-how like just for one or two tanks to be run from this pod would take a lot of time energy and resources like the pod is described as a single city and it's described as like barely keeping itself afloat but it can have this massive military force like that doesn't make sense for like in the real world the Netherlands is a pretty wealthy country and as of 2022 it had 18 tanks in service like not 1800 18 and that's an entire not huge country but an entire country with a lot of money to throw around this convoy also passes by B and the others and they hide inside the tank that they stole I feel like the engine heat should have given them away there but what do I know so Silas tells Quinn that they need to get to the Grove quick and they can't share any more air with him they've been sharing their oxygen tanks and so they find this big respirator which is like the one Mod had it's too big to carry around and they just hook him up to it put his mask on and say hey we'll be back in a couple of days and he's like but there's not enough food or anything they're like yeah you're just gonna have to deal with it and they just leave him there and a little while later some soldiers come by and Quinn flags them down and he claims he was knocked by the rebels and they say oh cool and they just save him and these soldiers are led by a general with a helmet on so they can't see his face and this is Quinn's dad I don't know why they insisted on making this a twist is the thing like it should have just been Quinn knows his dad is in charge of the military but he thinks that's a good thing and he's happy about it and then later he sees his dad do terrible stuff and is upset by it because the twist as it is now just doesn't work so right after this there is some vegetation nearby like trees bushes and stuff some of it I think was natural and some was planted by the rebels I don't know not important but the soldiers all pull out some containers and they spray herbicide all over the place just killing all the plants and at first I saw this and I was like that is really weird like that's just making your evil government evil for no reason but then I thought about it and I was like well ok making a tree killing chemical would take more resources and it would be hard to keep secret and it seems like fire would be easier but then I was also like ok the air is super thin so it wouldn't burn easy fair enough and also I thought about it some more and I was like ok this prevents the world from healing and it puts continued strain on the pod and the government and its resources but remember what is good for the people or the country is not always what's good for the people who are in charge like if air outside was abundant and free then people could just leave the pod like the ministry would lose control and the books acknowledge this too like they straight up say the ministry doesn't want things to heal because they want to maintain control over the population and if it's possible to leave then they can just run away from their control and they don't want that and the books acknowledge that like they straight up say yeah this government's evil but it is also rational it's acting in its own self-interests and that's part of why I don't hate these books they have a few moments of intelligence sprinkled in there very few but they're there so then Quinn finds out that the general is his dad again we already knew his dad works for Cain Navery who was evil so this doesn't make us think much differently of him and then Inger gets killed and Silas and Quinn run off and in another version of this book like a better version of this book this would be the moment where Quinn decided that the ministry was evil and he joins the rebels like he would think that they're good people doing good things and he just wound up getting swept up in this adventure by mistake and then at this point he realizes oh okay you guys are evil so he just joins up with the rebels like if from this moment he decided to act like that that would make sense but he was doing it before where it didn't make sense so Alina and the others finally reach the grove and like they said earlier it's an old soccer stadium which is full of trees and rebels and we got Maud's backstory at one point which is actually not bad basically before the switch she was a nurse and when a lot of people realized like hey we're not gonna be saved there's not enough room in the pods and everything she helped them kill themselves like she did a bunch of assisted suicide and that was horrible for her it was horrible for them but the pod ministry doesn't want word of that getting out so they exiled her to keep her from telling anyone it's actually not a bad backstory and then Alina meets with Petra who is the leader of the rebels and she just explains everything that happened and Bea and Maud are taken prisoner just in case which again makes sense like they don't know them, they can't trust them and Petra tells Alina though that she started a war and by that she means the ministry is gonna come for them soon which is I straight up don't understand what she meant by that or why like the war was already ongoing like rebels are being killed they're making strongholds outside of ministry control they're trying to undermine the ministry's authority why would the ministry all of a sudden now want to attack because the main characters are involved now I guess like the entire plot revolves around them I suppose that's like saying World War II didn't begin until America joined you know or well I guess our education system is bad enough that a lot of Americans probably do believe that but it's not true like the ministry didn't know about the grove before or they didn't know where it was or they didn't think it was worth the effort to attack like one at least one of those three things has to be true but now they do know where it is and they do know it exists and they do think it's worth the effort to attack why do they think that like nothing changed you know as far as we can tell Alina and the others like weren't followed by anyone who reported back to base or anything like they just they're under attack now because the main characters are there this is just the book taking really big moments and throwing them in without taking the time to actually justify them so instead of hitting with like the big impact they're supposed to hit with it just you just hit with a shrug you know it just doesn't work and yeah the army basically is about to come to the grove the rebels they do have some weapons but nothing heavy you know they don't have anything to take out air power they don't have anything to take out heavy armor nothing like that so then Quinn arrives along with Silas and everybody trains for a while not much happens in this bit to be honest like this whole section of the book is pretty dull like Quinn and Bee get sent back to the pod they pretend that they've been kidnapped and Quinn's parents try to get him to marry Cain Navery's daughter whose name is Niom Navery once again please look at the screen to see how this thing is spelled and then Maude and Alina go out for a while and recruit some drifters to the rebels it's a great way to throw out any excitement that you may have felt up before this point it's like watching the thing and then during the blood test and scene it cuts to the chest bursting scene from Alien they're both good on their own but they keep distracting from one another so back in the pod Quinn is supposed to give a press conference where he just talks to the cameras and it gets broadcast on the news and he's supposed to talk about his experience with the rebels and how horrible it was it's basically supposed to make people hate the rebels and see them as evil terrorists and meanwhile the army is going to attack the Grove and destroy it and kill everyone there and during the conference Quinn just decides to go off script like he tells everybody about how the ministry is killing all the trees and how they're being overfed oxygen because they don't want them going outside and it is possible to live outside and people get really mad about that and they start yelling and protesting and then Cain Navery has the police crack down violently and then it turns into a riot which is how most protests turn into riots to be honest so the riots escalate and go completely nuts and consume the entire pod and Cain Navery winds up being killed in the chaos which is dumb because Cain Navery was the only villain we had up until this point like he wasn't good but we did know him and he was at least starting to have something resembling a personality and after this he's replaced with a totally new character which is just annoying because that totally new character fills the exact same role in the story but we also have zero chance to get to know him slash hate him slash fear him and while the riot is going on the parents are killed and then she escapes the pod and runs off into the wasteland meanwhile the army attacks the Grove and Quinn's dad again the guy in charge of their entire military is leading from the front line and Petra the leader of the rebels is also leading like both of the leaders are in the middle of the fighting which that's not how modern warfare works it's just too dangerous it's too risky that's like if Donald Rumsfeld personally led the US invasion of Iraq got into a shootout with Saddam Hussein and the Republican Guard if that sounds weird and stupid that's because it is so Alina's at the battle and she shoots an advancing soldier and she spends about two sentences feeling bad about her first murder which it's not a murder like your soldier's in a war it's a horrible thing to kill somebody I'll give you that but it's not murder that's not what that word means but then this also just never comes back up which it's kind of annoying you know like again these characters have so little personality I would rather have Alina start angst over killing people if she's going to angst about killing people you know have it go on for a bit and have her learn and develop from that or just have her not be bothered by it too much now one good detail here which I did like and did make me kind of like the ending of this first book is that the rebels just get completely stomped in this battle like it is completely one sided they do very little damage to the ministry soldiers and they are almost completely wiped out and that makes total sense because they have no anti-tank weaponry they have no anti-air weaponry they have very little protection from a modern military in a straight up fight like that's why they were an insurgency before this point that's why they were sneaking around stealing clippings from trees and stuff like they can't just straight up fight them and it would have been smarter admittedly for them to just run and like maybe leave a bunch of booby traps at the grove to try and kill some soldiers while they're there but like they just they had no chance of winning it would have been better for them to just get out of dodge like I don't know they just too many stories like this would have had them come up with some sort of BS plan that saved the day but they just had no options here like modern military might is just way too overwhelming to people who have nothing but some rifles and shotguns like the deck is too stacked against them but here's the thing this is meant to be like the low point cliffhanger which leads into the sequel so I don't think this was done out of a sense of military realism you know like I think this was good on accident is what I'm saying because if this were done out of a sense of military realism then they wouldn't have had much of an actual battle like they send regular infantry there regular soldiers with guns to attack and Alina shooting at them like I said but it would have been smart to just stand back a couple of kilometers and bombard it it's not as if they're trying to capture the grove or it's not as if the rebels have any hostages or anything valuable there there's nothing valuable nearby the grove that they don't want to that they want to avoid destroying it's a ruined city it's a wasteland so they can just stand back a while fire at it with their tanks and helicopters until there's nothing left and then maybe send some infantry in to clear up what's left so the army is able to destroy the entire grove like they blow up a bunch and then they spray what's left with herbicide but because of the riot back at the pod they do have to stop the attack early and go back to put down the riot so they aren't able to stick around and hunt down all the survivors which means some of them are able to escape again, that actually makes sense hey! and like I said Bea escapes the pod, Quinn is arrested but then his father comes and talks to him in his cell and he's like hey they're gonna execute you for what you did you got Cain Navery the pod minister killed so I'm just gonna throw you outside now with a little bit of air and just good luck out there kid and he releases him he goes out and apparently everyone is heading west to a place called Sequoia which is like another rebel stronghold somewhere far away like Alina's heading there, Bea and Quinn somehow heard about it and they're heading there and that's the end of book one so like I said it's bad but it's not the worst thing ever it is just stupid stupid and silly you know I I wish it had been third person instead of different POVs like that would have made it better if the characters had a bit more personality that would have been better if the world had been changed to make more sense that would have made it a little bit better like etc you know it's close to being good at times it's a bad book but it's not unsalvageable but even the few bits that are good in here like the final battle like I said it's overshadowed by just how monumentally dumb all of the science is like at the end of this copy of the book there is a Q&A section with the author and the author says that she heard oxygen being depleted is very plausible and she hopes it doesn't happen it's not plausible guys like putting more CO2 into the atmosphere is bad but the idea that we're going to suffocate is not how it works and I don't know whatever anyways now we move on to book two which is called resist and this is like I said the last one there's only two and this one is worse than the first book to be honest like funny bad things like the science is already past so now this one is just a continuation of the war story sort of like by the time we get to the climax the climax of the series is just complete nonsense with several different villains coming and going in very quick succession so like I was saying earlier we can't get attached to any of them there's a focus on sexual assault near the end of this one and remember that dude in the alley who called Alina my tasty that seemed to briefly imply a threat of sexual assault but now it's like a major part of the story for both B and Alina so that's uh that's not good like I said though I do like the cover it has greenery now you can see the wasteland healing which is showing like hey the world is being saved and there's a tagline at the top which says fight until your last breath which I liked it it kind of worked so like I said it's not a total loss and we'll go over some more later so once again we start with an Alina chapter she is on a boat with some other rebels and Silas is being a sad boy because the grove is gone and everything we fought for is gone which like no you're going to Sequoia because there's more rebels there like you're leaving to fight another day you survived but okay whatever and Alina says that even days later she can taste the toxic foam that destroyed the trees meaning she would have had to swallow her and hail some that sounds cancerlicious to me so one of the rebels a woman named Holly tries to kill herself by jumping off the ship and then Alina saves her and then later she escapes the room where they were holding her and she kills herself for real I guess it's kind of sad but the fact that we don't know anything about Holly or who she is kind of robs it of any impact and then we go to Bee who is only focusing on very important things when I pined for Quinn I thought I knew what people meant when they talked about having broken hearts I didn't know a thing now my insides are all eaten up my heart pumps what little axe oxygen I have around my body but the breath doesn't make me whole girl there's a time and a place right now you are wandering the wasteland without enough oxygen this is not the time or the place to be pining after your old boyfriend kind of like just the dude you had a crush on who you're also friends with like imagine if someone tied a cinder block around your ankle and threw you in the ocean and then you started wondering if it was a good idea to eat that gas station sushi for dinner last night like you have more pressing issues she also says that nobody in the pod believes in God anymore which is kind of dumb like I don't think religion would completely banish in this world especially not so soon after the apocalypse and anyways her and Quinn are wandering for a while and they find jazz who is one of the rebels who survived the battle at the grove and jazz is wounded so they try to help her and then we are finally introduced to the fourth and last POV character whose name is Ronan his full name is Ronan Navery because he's Kane Navery's son he is a member of the special forces which I assume means he's a highly trained soldier and he is completely okay with his dad being killed in the riots like yeah he already knew about all the worst parts of the government and he hates it because he was actually at the grove at the battle and he helped destroy the trees so it takes zero effort literally zero effort to move him to the rebels side later on like it it would have been kind of neat to see things from the other side you know maybe we could see how soldiers are indoctrinated or otherwise kept in line by the government maybe see Ronan be super patriotic and think yes the ministry is doing the right thing and then realize that he's wrong and change over time like that that could have been neat but we just throw all that out and he's just a good guy from the beginning which is so much less interesting so Ronan and his sister Neom Navery are under house arrest and they're not allowed to leave for their own protection and they have communications very restricted so they can't watch the news or anything they have no idea what's going on outside and it's so horrible like their servant is not allowed in so they have to feed themselves for the first time in their lives that is the horror let me tell you so then Quinn's dad the general his real name is Jude by the way comes in and he tells them the uprising was put down and the riots are over like they pumped a bunch of gas into the streets which knocked people unconscious I don't know why that would take several days to do that seems like something that would take like an hour but okay whatever and Ronan just wants to quit the army like he's like okay I don't want to fight for people who are destroying trees and making the world worse just to protect their own power but the general won't let him and then we go back to being Quinn and Quinn leaves B with jazz to take care of her make sure she doesn't die and then he's gonna go to Sequoia and bring back help and medical care and then we go back to Ronan this is part of why I hate having multiple first-person POV characters like authors never paste the storylines correctly and they keep getting in each other's way so the general wants to send out Ronan to search for rebels and he's sending out Ronan and the other junior special forces to search for rebels because the rebels would trust young people sure and I don't know why they're called the junior special forces because most special forces operators are pretty young like in fact most frontline soldiers in general are young men like they're not like in movies where they're all 45 like they're 20 years old at the most a lot of times like so hearing junior special forces makes me imagine a bunch of 7 year old kids wearing combat fatigues and while they're on the trip outside the general talks with Ronan for a bit and he says hey I can't let you just quit the army but I can get you and Quinn both new identities and help you get new lives so you can start over and live as auxiliary all you have to do is bring back Quinn alive which doesn't make sense like again I was approaching this like the pot was just a single city and not even a particularly big one like maybe a million people at the very most and they're all crammed into a tight space so it seems like it would be very difficult to disappear and start up a new life there you know because you would almost certainly run into somebody who knew you and even if you didn't you would just like appear one day and people would be like hey I don't remember that guy like you know that's that's weird so the plan is kind of stupid but the general also just throws Ronan out there without actually confirming that he likes the plan and agrees to it he just tells him hey call me when you find Quinn and that's it I also don't know why he didn't just get Quinn a new identity earlier like he threw him out of the pod and into the wasteland instead of just getting him a new life which he apparently can do but whatever and then B stays with jazz for a long time worrying about how she might die I am not sure how long those two are down there the others are still traveling for what seems like a week maybe and this is all supposed to be happening simultaneously but at the same time when you read through B's section it sounds like she's there for like a day and a half at most I don't know these these timelines don't add up and that's part of why having multiple POV characters and multiple interlocking storylines is a tricky thing to do so Alina finally finds Sequoia with the other rebels and they are all let inside it's like again just another rebel stronghold it's different than the Grove but it's it's there they're let inside they're safe now and Quinn travels through the ruined city by himself for a while it's it's more ruined since the battle and upon reading that I realized like yeah we didn't get a whole lot of description of what the city actually looks like you know like how crumbling are the buildings is it all dust and sand or is it something else you know it would have been kind of nice to get that but whatever it's more ruined since the battle and he runs into two people he runs into Joe a pregnant girl who seems really young like 15 or 16 at most and Abel who was Alina's old boyfriend who supposedly died early on in the first book this twist leads nowhere and it doesn't make any sense how did Abel wind up surviving I don't know we don't get much of his backstory like he just I guess ran off at some point but then it doesn't make sense why the government would declare him dead in public like if he unless they knew for certain he was dead they wouldn't say yeah we killed this guy because if he was found to be alive later they would look stupid it would make much more sense for them to just say hey this terrorist tried to do this bad thing and we tried to catch him but he escaped and he's on the run now so be on the lookout like that's what governments do a lot of the time they tell them hey there's a threat out there only I can protect you from the threat so don't do anything to threaten my power or else the bad thing will come and get you and you'll die like that that's what they do all the time so this would be like if the day after 9-11 the US government just said hey Osama bin Laden's dead now we got him and then like two days later bin Laden just put out a video saying hey I'm actually not dead like that that is what this is like so anyways Joe Abel and Quinn all travel to Sequoia together and then over at Sequoia Alina meets with the leader who is a man named Max please look at the screen to see how that is spelled for just a moment like that's an amazing name like it's a totally normal name but they insist on spelling it weird it's like that meme with that pregnant lady with a chalkboard with all the weird names on it it's like that now Max is kind of creepy and he's like creepily staring at Alina and some other girls and hugging them just a little too long you know things like that and it's mentioned that he really didn't like Petra who was the other rebel leader at the Grove who died during the battle at the last book and I actually kind of like that detail you know the rebels have divisions here like even though Max's crew and Petra's crew at the Grove were both fighting the ministry they weren't really working together they they didn't like each other and that's very realistic like revolutions do have splits like that because Petra basically just wanted to try and restore the environment to show people it's possible to live outside and then they would all just like leave that would undermine the the ministry's power without firing a shot ideally whereas Max his faction well at first it seems like he just wants to violently overthrow the ministry really Max is a cult leader and he wants to build a harem and then later he wants to violently overthrow the ministry and he also wants to destroy the pod I don't know like again it's nice that they have this division but it's not handled super well like it's not a super deep exploration of why these revolutions fracture you know usually it's about why they rebel in the first place because when there's a dictatorship they make a lot of different enemies all across the political spectrum like you know some rebels are religious extremists some are socialists some are liberals you know things like that and if the people fighting against the pod ministry were like that then that would make a bit more sense but I don't know for a minute it's nice to have and also while Quinn is traveling with Joe we find out that her baby's dad is actually Max and she just refers to him as vile and Quinn doesn't ask a whole lot of questions beyond that but you know it makes it clear that oh Max is bad it's it's awkward foreshadowing but at least it's there and back at Sequoia again we just keep having to go back and forth back at Sequoia the others are tested for fertility which is hinting that something nefarious is going on but it's we don't know what right now just something bad and the people there also have this weird I don't want to say religious reverence but like they have a strong spiritual connection with nature and they seem to think that trees and plants and everything are very very important and it could have been neat but it's never really expanded on we acknowledge that nature has more power than we do Dorian explains okay it clearly doesn't though because you destroyed nature literally just look outside dude so Ronan the soldier who was sent out to look for Quinn does not find Quinn but he does find Bea and Jazz where they're hiding and he calls in some help and Jazz is taken away from medical care and then him and Bea go on to Sequoia and finally Quinn reaches Sequoia and Alina is super happy that Abel her old boyfriend is alive nothing comes of this so like I said the plot twist was meaningless but she's happy that he's alive and we also find out that Joe originally ran off but then decided she couldn't live out in the wasteland especially not being heavily pregnant and it turns out that Max is her baby daddy and he just hits her across the face so hard that she falls to the ground in front of everybody so again we know yep he's evil and controlling again it's not like super heavily foreshadowed or anything that he's evil it's just telling us he's evil but at least it is telling us before he goes full cuckoo by the end so then we go back to Bea and Ronan who are still on their way to Sequoia because we are still trying to get the story going we're almost halfway through the book and the story has not even really started yet so some drifters attack and they attempt to sexually assault Bea and they don't they attempt to but they don't do it because Ronan shoots two of them and then the last one Bea kills with a pitchfork and I don't like this I don't like that they put this in there because it's just so cheap to have a character who was largely independent and proactive up until this point but now she has to be saved by someone else like it feels almost like this scene is there to reassure us that Ronan is definitely the good guy and we don't need to worry about him betraying anybody and maybe that would work but we see things from his perspective like there's no doubt whose side he's on so we're not worrying we're not wondering but I don't know at the very least Bea does get to do something here like she kills someone and then she feels awful about it for a bit but then she understands like okay it needed to be done and so she accepts it and moves on like I said she has a little bit of personality to her she is the one who decided to save Maude she's the one that stayed behind with Jazz with no confirmation that she would ever get out of there like maybe Quinn would die on the way or maybe he wouldn't be able to bring help back or something and she would just be stuck there but she decided to stay behind with her striving to be decent and making her helpless for one scene might be fine if she was the protagonist and she got a whole bunch of time to shine but she barely gets any time to shine here as is so giving her one scene of helplessness really detracts from all the good stuff so finally Quinn who is at Sequoia gets in a helicopter with some soldiers and flies off to pick up Bea and now things can fucking happen still dumb because first there's no way that the rebels could have a helicopter like they would need fuel and if there's fuel for helicopters that means someone is drilling for oil and refining it like if the pod has helicopters like sure I'm willing to accept that they have some oil somewhere that they're drilling for and that they're refining it or they have like storage from before the switch or something like that's believable enough but the rebels no there's no way they'd have the resources to do that and on top of that helicopters need about four hours of maintenance for every one hour of flight and it's not easy to learn how to do all that maintenance and it's also not easy to produce all the spare parts needed like there's no way the rebels would have all of this that's somewhat believable for the pod but it is way way outside the realm of possibility for the rebels and secondly I defaulted because so many books in during this young adult dystopian boom all just took place in ruins of the United States I just defaulted to thinking that this took place in the US like everybody was American but they mentioned that the helicopter used to belong to the RAF and they don't straight up say what the RAF is but I assume it means Royal Air Force like the British Air Force not the Red Army Faction that was a very different thing so there's an RAF helicopter nearby and they also use some English slang so I think the story takes place in Great Britain but then there's also points which make it seem like it kind of takes place in the US like they call ski masks balaclavas like we don't call them balaclavas in the US usually but then they also say soccer instead of football and at one point they mentioned that the drinking age is 21 whereas it's 18 over there I don't know like it doesn't make a lot of difference either way but it is a failure of world building because the environment and the surroundings of the characters is so vague that it could be in either place and those are very different places so Alina and Silas decide you know what Max sucks we're gonna leave Sequoia now but he confirms oh no you're all prisoners now you don't get to leave like the place is a baby mill you need to pump out more people and grow the population as much as possible no reason for wanting to grow the population is ever given they just they just want to do it like there's there's something about wanting to breed people who can live in this environment and thrive in this new world with very little oxygen but again normal people can train themselves to live out in the very little oxygen areas so you don't understand why you would need to breed more people with that trait it doesn't make any sense and so now the story is just about Alina and the others trying to escape from Sequoia for some reason like I thought this story was about them fighting against the evil government but I guess not and also just to reassure us that Max is evil he marries Alina against her will and this is what happens on their wedding night I'm sleeping on the floor I say fine he says Joe did that for a year eventually she jumped into bed with me and it had nothing to do with the cold he pulls his shirt over his head and reveals his chest maybe he thinks I'll be won over by his body I look away and lie down on the floor oh great now both women POV characters in this book have the threat of sexual assault thrown at them for cheap character development great great like that I mean neither of them ever get assaulted thankfully but like could the author not think of anything else geez like it's just I don't know it is so odd to me that this rebellion slash war story is suddenly about escaping a cult who didn't exist until a few minutes ago and Quinn has held prisoner too and they all plan to go back to the pod and get his dad to help launch a coup slash uprising it's actually never made clear if he wants to just take the military overthrow the ministry as it is and then make things better which would be a coup, there'd be very little fighting or he just wants to start a general uprising where everybody comes together and there's a big battle like it's never made clear which they want to do but okay whatever so Ronan and Bee go back to the pod to help with the plan and this line needs to be heard what does that girl do to people he asks what do you mean Bee Whitcraft turns boys into men what what is he even saying there is he calling her a slut so we go back and forth between preparation for the uprising at the pod and the escape from Sequoia to avoid going back and forth too much let's just go over the escape from Sequoia first Alina kills somebody named Crab and then buries him and this doesn't come back later she learns that Max is planning on attacking the pod with his rebels and they're going to cut the tubing on the air recycling stations which would cut off the air supply and just kill everyone there and the characters decide that they have to stop him because he's just the antagonist now like Cain Navery is gone so I guess they needed somebody and then Alina and Quinn break out all the pregnant women and babies and other people who are hanging out in the medical wing and they do it at night so they're all like super quiet and everything and most people are sleeping and most of the people who they break out are fine with the situation like they didn't want to escape before or they didn't know how bad it was at least but now they all just go along with the escape with no prompting whatsoever not even very little prompting like we need to get out of here or anything like that just no prompting they wake up and some people are going let's go and they just go and then Alina straight up says that they can't care for infants out in the wasteland they're like we don't have food and for them so it would make sense to like leave them for now and then come back later like if you've ever seen The Promised Neverland which is a at least the first season is pretty good there is a similar situation where characters realize like okay we need to get out of here but we can't carry the little little kids with us so we're just gonna have to leave them here and then come back later and then they entrust one of the other kids like hey if we don't come back then you're gonna have to be responsible for getting them out like you know this scene could have hit a lot harder is what I'm saying like they could have said okay well we better succeed out there and survive not just for our own sakes but so we can come back and save the babies but they bring the babies along and then nothing bad happens and they plan to go to the pod and warn the ministry about sabotage to prevent all the people in the pod from dying because I guess they're just they're on the ministry that's the thing and that is it that is the whole escape subplot there are no elaborate plans there's no real difficulties that they run into they just wake up in the night say let's go and bring a bunch of people away and they they escape that's it so now for the plan to overthrow the pod government Ronan hides about 50 rebels in the attic of his apartment 50 I would point out that that's ridiculous but if you need me to tell you that's ridiculous you are already a lost cause now some of the rebels here are just soldiers from the pod who decided that they want to fight against the ministry some of them are rebels who have fought before like I guess they were at the battle of the grove and escaped I'm not totally sure because it's not really expanded on but they are experienced rebels let's say and some are some just new citizens from out in the pod who they start training like he can house these people in his house and they can train in an abandoned gym without anyone noticing like okay like it's mentioned that now the ministry is starting to cut off air to empty apartments to prevent you know squatters and other people from hiding in empty apartments and I feel like that should be the default you know again like oxygen is a precious resource so why are they pumping into empty apartments that no one lives in okay that's that's just a thing okay we have to learn to live with it so then Ronan's sister Neom Navery figures out something is wrong because he has a picture of B on his pad like it's essentially his phone he just has a picture of her on there and she's like hey that girl is a terrorist I know something is up now and that's what tips her off that's like trying to hide the fact that you're in Al Qaeda but then you wear a shirt that says I heart Osama bin Laden it's just stupid so then right after that Neom Navery rats them out and soldiers come to the attic and arrest them all and then they meet the new pod minister who was never even mentioned before this point he's the new pod minister whose name is Lance Vine what the fuck are these names Lance Vine sounds like the name of a grass type gym leader in Pokemon and his only personality trait is that he's evil that is it that is literally it he's evil that's all you need to know about him Vine rubs his hands together as though he's about to be served a large meal this is getting better and better he says this dude is a literal cartoon character it is impossible to take him seriously on any level you should have just stuck with Cain Navery I know I said that already but you should have just stuck with him because at least we got the chance to know him a little bit and Ronan fighting against his dad might have been cool you could have done something with that but this guy he's introduced 75% of the way through the last book he does very very little and then he dies unceremoniously 17 pages later I swear to god I'm not making that up 17 pages after he comes into the attic and arrests all the rebels he dies that's not even nothing but Ronan manages to not be arrested and gathers his remaining fighters and he says hey we'll fight the ministry and the Sequoian rebels at the same time and Max brings his army in and they attack and they manage to damage air tubing and the air to the less important areas gets shut down first so like the poor areas they stop getting oxygen first and the prison also stops getting oxygen because that's not considered essential and that is where Bea is being interrogated in her cell by Lance Vine and because the cell is airtight and no one opens it for some reason like the minister is just there by himself he doesn't have any security or anything there's nobody outside the door in case of an emergency they just put him in a cell with this terrorist and expect things to be fine and because the air is shut off and he's not used to having such thin air he suffocates very quickly and dies and then Bea is okay because she's trained herself to use less oxygen and I'll admit, even though the science behind it is total nonsense, this is still kind of a cool moment for Bea she's literally strapped to a chair and she's able to survive while the villain dies that's kind of cool she's the one good POV in this series and then the final battle really begins it's mentioned that there are multiple regiments guarding the air recycling machines like multiple regiments of soldiers the exact number of soldiers in a regiment does vary depending on the country but one regiment is at least 600 soldiers so just in this one area protecting each individual recycler there are thousands of soldiers just in this one area again, how big is the pod how do they have this many soldiers and the rebels Max's rebels specifically, the ones from Sequoia are able to overwhelm the armed forces so how many rebels are there none of this makes sense it's like, again, you just wanted to have a big battle but you didn't do anything to justify it Max's soldiers appear and they attack how does Max have hundreds of armed soldiers I'm not sure again, Sequoia seems like there would be maybe two or three hundred people there at most and a lot of them would be non-combatants but okay, whatever and how did they get there so quickly I don't know, how did they get there undetected I don't know but they they got there and actually I was thinking for a minute like if most people in the pod can't exercise because air is expensive then they're probably in really bad shape they can't run that well whereas all the rebels and everybody who's used to the thin air outside coming in and getting the 30% oxygen of the pod they're probably going to feel like Superman you know, it's like like I was saying earlier, going to a high elevation and then going to sea level and suddenly you're just in much better shape now the Sequoian rebels and the rebels the good guy rebels that Ronan has all three sides are very mixed up in this final battle it's hard to tell who's doing what but the rebels are charging in trenched positions where the ministry soldiers are and the ministry soldiers are firing on them with automatic weapons but the rebels manage to reach the ministry soldiers and beat them and you might wonder how they do that well it's because they have shields and those shields are made from car doors and car doors are not bullet proof dude like this would annoy me a little bit less I'd be thinking like ok that's not how it works but whatever it's not real life, I'll accept it but it annoys me more because later on Alina mentions that they aren't bullet proof and the rebels are getting slaughtered was this edited at all like one minute the car doors are bullet proof the next they're not editors do your job now I do like this final battle though unlike before the battle at the grove the ministry doesn't have much of an equipment advantage like they can't use tanks or helicopters in the pod because they'll destroy everything so the playing field is a bit more even it does make at least some sense that the rebels would be able to win in this case so yeah I kinda liked that and then the air gets cut off to zone 3 which is the poor zone and the auxiliaries launch an uprising again and they attack a bunch of the soldiers along with all the rebels now I realized at this point that I kind of wish that there had been at least one POV character who lived among normal people in the pod for a while in the second book because remember they already had that huge riot at the end of the first book because they realized oh ok our government is lying to us and they're overfeeding us air they're specifically making it so we can't go outside even though we could possibly start a life out there and they get really mad but then that uprising gets forcibly put down and it's like well it'd be kinda neat to see how people live in the aftermath of that so the pod's going into complete chaos Quinn finds his mom and his siblings and gets them out of dodge but his mom starts going into labor as they're escaping did I mention that his mom was pregnant no but the books didn't mention it until this moment either so apparently she was very heavily pregnant and then she gives birth and everything is fine so the rebels also attack the prison and free everybody there including B and then she runs off to find her friends and while she's running through the streets she steals an air tank from two kids like just that's a dick move but that's what she does there's two kids fighting over an air tank she steals it and runs off and then she goes to Quinn and she's like hey let's get the fuck out of here and they decide to get the fuck out of there Ronan meanwhile is still fighting who is he fighting the enemy like I'm unsure from page to page whether he's fighting the ministry or the Sequoian rebels like that is the problem with multi-sided battles like you have to make it clear in the pros who's who but after a little bit it's just fully about fighting Max and his crew so there you go they're just the villains now they're just fully switched and then Alina manages to come face to face with Max and he does that thing where the heroes have the gun on trained on the villain and the villain's like you'll never kill me you don't have it in you you don't have the guts and so for a minute I was sitting there thinking like okay they're gonna have to find some other way to defeat him or something but no actually Alina just shoots him like no hesitation at all and that actually does make sense to killing people now and it did catch me off guard so I was like oh okay they just they took out the villain when they had the chance good on you heroes that said Max goes out like a little bitch you know it was way too easy to kill him the same way it was way too easy to kill Lance Vine and Kane Navery like Max has a little bit of personality sure like it's really just being a creepy cult leader but he has a little bit there but he never really came across as a threat and he doesn't have much presence in any of the scenes he's in so I guess he's the best villain of the main three in the series but he's still not great or even good for that matter and something about the fact that the bad guys at the end are not the evil governments but a different group of rebels something about that just annoys me because if you want to do a story about how sometimes revolutions get too bloodthirsty because living in such awful conditions robs you of your humanity then just commit to it you know do a story about that like you can't just introduce a new character who is ostensibly on the side of the rebels and then make them evil like you have to show somebody we know falling into that trap because they're just so consumed by hate that they lose sight of what they were fighting for honestly I think the best way to do that would have had to be making Alina a bad guy at the end here not necessarily the main villain but one of the villains because she has motive for wanting to kill everyone in the pot she should have been on the side of Max and the others like her parents were killed before the story even began like I didn't mention that earlier because it's not that important but it is there like in the backstory her parents were killed and her boyfriend was killed later or at least she thought he was he comes back for no reason and she was at the Battle of the Grove where she is nearly killed by ministry soldiers and we know Alina pretty well like it would be much more powerful to see somebody that we previously viewed as being heroic fall you know and fall into that trap and start saying it's okay to murder a bunch of innocent people in the pursuit of my goal like that would be more powerful or maybe she was just like that the entire time and we didn't realize it until much later either way you wouldn't need to change that much of the story to make it happen and it would give you a much much more compelling villain so despite the leader of both the evil ministry forces and the evil sequoian forces both being dead the battle just keeps going for a bit like the sequoians set a bunch of bombs to destroy the pod I thought they were just gonna destroy the air recyclers not destroy the whole thing but whatever and then Alina is like oh I can't disable the bomb so she just grabs it and runs off with it and then once she's far away from the pod it goes off and it kills her but she saves everybody and then suddenly after that the ministry and the good rebels have the sequoians at gunpoint like they lost again I don't know why they were trying to destroy the pod altogether because they had already destroyed most of the air recyclers so it leaves them in a situation where they are unable to threaten sequoia like even if they find out where they are and decide they want to attack they'd be unable to because so many people would be dead and they'd be too focused on rebuilding and with the ministry gone maybe they'd be able to set up a friendly government so that the sequoians would have an ally over there instead of just a bunch of pissed off people who want nothing more than them all to die like Max's soldiers have the intelligence of a mentally disabled moth that I swear oh by the way Max's second in command who I assume is commanding all the soldiers after his death is a woman named Vanya and we see her earlier but we do not see her at all during the climax and we never find out her fate like we never find out what happens to her after the battle she's just she's she was there now she's gone and also during the fighting Quinn's dad is wounded and Quinn finds him and he tries saving him he's like hold on dad and it doesn't work like he isn't able to save him but they do make up right before his dad dies and it's actually an ok scene you know it's not amazing because I wasn't really attached to either of these characters like they just they have no personality between them but seeing him go hey I'm proud of you son like it's it's still got me a little bit and then we go to the epilogue which is from B's perspective they are building a new town outside the pod and her and Quinn are officially together now yeah if you forgot there was supposed to be a romance there I don't blame you like she was just in love with him and he didn't seem to reciprocate much and just in the epilogue that they're just in love and they're together now and there are other people who are starting to come out of the pod like they're getting used to the thin air they're training themselves to get used to it so the world is saved you know all the bad guys are dead the ministry's power is broken a lot of good people died in the process but they did succeed and now it's time to rebuild a better world like it's it's a good ending to be honest like they got it's a happy ending sure but the characters did have to suffer and work at least somewhat to do it and they did lose friends along the way like Alina died and Quinn's dad died and a bunch of rebels and ministry soldiers and just regular people died as well so that was breathe and like I said it's it's not that bad you know like it is bad it's stupid it's silly but there's nothing to get angry about here you know there are words these words are mostly correct and these mostly correct words are in the mostly correct order like it could be worse like it's following a trend obviously of you know young adult dystopian novels which were huge like 12 years ago and it was always about overthrowing an evil government and even if it's following that trend that trend does at least give it the skeleton of a good story you know it gives you something to work with at the very least but the problem here is that there's nothing besides that skeleton you know there's no meat or organs there like this video might have seemed like it went by fairly quick but that's just because there's little substance here like there's barely anything other than the contrived twists and point A, point B like characters are living under evil governments they run away from evil government they fight evil government fight evil government some more fight evil government along with evil rebels and then the day is saved like there's just nothing else there to talk about character wise or story wise like most of the story is just things happening and I am vaguely aware that I'm supposed to care about it but I just don't you know like it's like having sex with a ghost I can't feel anything but I'm aware that I should be feeling things the worst parts of this book series are honestly just the junk science and the fact that the characters are really dull well that and the fact that the story is really disjointed and doesn't really have clear villains you know like those are the worst things here like the world is ridiculous but the message almost works you know forcing people to pay for air something that they need and that they have no choice but to pay you for that's just extortion and that that is the message here but it's not focused on enough so it doesn't quite work you know like 1984 is also a ridiculous dystopian book like the world that 1984 takes place and is pretty over the top when you stop to think about it but it does get the point across so people are fine with it and breathe doesn't focus on the point enough so it doesn't really get the point across and so it doesn't quite work you know like they should have had a lot more time showing us how life is for auxiliaries and the final villains of this story really just shouldn't have been rebels because honestly the final villains being rebels makes it seem like the ministry is almost correct you know it feels like they're saying I'm the only thing standing between you and chaos and like they were almost correct like if it weren't for the fact that people are able to adjust to having less oxygen in the environment then the ministry would have been correct like all the rebels would have been crazy terrorists who are going to get everybody killed like the simplistic messaging here really just needed to have a simplistic story because it's not bad for a story to be simplistic it is bad for a story to be unfocused and breathe very much is unfocused because first it's about running from the ministry for at least for Alina it's about running from the ministry and then the others join up despite having literally no reason to join up then it is about finding the Grove then it's about fighting the ministry then it's about finding Sequoia several times because remember we have several different characters or groups of characters who are all trying to find it and they find it at different times so we have to watch them find Sequoia more than once then it's about escaping a cult then it's about fighting the ministry and Sequoians at the same time except they're only sort of fighting the ministry and the ministry are almost the good guys at the end but also they were still evil for trapping people in the pod and forcing them to pay for air like none of these ideas are necessarily bad but none of them flow very well and they especially don't lead into each other very well there are three main antagonists one of whom gets no screen time and two of whom get almost no screen time and all of them have no personality beyond being evil and having names that sound like they were chosen by 20 year old Mormon parents like Cain Navery has a drinking problem that's something but it never goes anywhere and Max is kind of a creepy rapist but that's not really focused on enough to really even make us hate him that much like obviously I didn't like the guy but if you want us to really hate him for being a creepy rapist you have to have him do something or almost do something pretty bad not necessarily sexually assault somebody but something and then I guess the final villain is Vanya who is Max's second in command who is still leading the army at the very end of the battle like I don't know like I guess that's how it works I guess she was the final villain and even the uncomfortable sexual assault stuff is barely there so I can't get mad at it you know I'm just annoyed and even then not very annoyed just slightly annoyed like that's it the series isn't that bad it is almost competent at times it's just an adventure story about overthrowing an evil government we're driving in the right direction but the air conditioning in this car is broken and everybody else wants to listen to bluegrass music you know like it it's not a total failure but it's not pleasant there are worse books out there that I have read but there are also worse books out there that are much more entertaining and much more fun to go through than this series because if this book series had had even one or two truly bizarre things which like you had opportunities to throw some weird shit in there and if there had just been one or two really bizarre things like one or two weird characters one or two really bizarre events or something it would stick out a little bit more in my head like maybe Cain Navery only became evil because his dad was a serial killer and he carries the serial killer gene and he doesn't want to be a serial killer but he has to it's just in his genetics which is that's an actual plot point in Riverdale by the way that show is nuts or what if the pod had some sort of state mandated religion where everybody had to follow it and they worshiped the last tree you know like there'd just be one big one in the middle of the pod and they'd be like there's no more out there this is the last one and they'll worship it but then it turns out it wasn't the last tree you know like it go big or go home is what I'm saying this book series is only a duology and I was thinking maybe if it was a trilogy it maybe it would have just been the exact same story but stretched out even more and so the even worse and more boring or forcing the author to fill more time might have forced her to throw in a bunch of weird stuff like I don't know man I just I don't have that much else to say about this like this is just the Lorax but it's serious and kind of edgy but other than that I don't have anything else to say and hopefully that's not the case with my next review so next up after breathe I am gonna do a retelling of the myth of Hades and Persephone no not that one no not that one either yeah that's right that one ever this is a paranormal romance aimed at teen girls and it is based on a story about the original incel so surely this won't be full of toxicity and stupidity and weird character choices I'm sure but anyways that's all see you later goodbye oh okay you're you're still you're still watching well thanks I appreciate it you know I could always use more watch time you see all these names here these are my patrons these are people that send me money once a month over on Patreon if you want to get your name here and also get early access to videos and stuff then consider donating please my ten dollar and up patrons are you're all great thanks I appreciate it that's all goodbye