A review by zinelib
Poster Girl by Veronica Roth

adventurous dark medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

I don't encounter that many books about female anti-heroes, maybe because there's an arrogance to the anti-hero narrative that isn't as common in women and nonbinary authors. I didn't enjoy reading this book that much, but by the end I appreciated the uniqueness of likability of irredeemable characters in a dystopia. 

Sonya Kantor (Jewish name--interesting in this current context of the evil nation state of Israel) is the title character. She's imprisoned for her part in a fallen Orwellian government known as the Delegation. Her now-deceased father was a leader in the regime, and she herself was the face of it, having posed for a propaganda poster captioned "What's right is right." Thanks to the intervention of her dead fiancé's brother Alexander, she is given a chance to right a wrong. The book is the story of that journey. 

There are some good bits of writing like

All anyone wants in Building 2 is to grind time down like a molar.

Sonya is numb to her life as the youngest person in the house arrest style prison, the Aperture, but she still has some fight in her. She challenges Alexander

"It seems to me," she says, "that if your every choice is in defiance of a system, you are as much a servant of that system as someone who obeys it."

Deep!

Here, an underground agent is discussing a piece of cyborg tech called an Insight installed in everyone's eye and brain under the Delegation. 

"The Insight wasn't some aberration or anomaly," he says. "It is the symptom of a disease that still infects our population--the desire to make everything easy, to sacrifice autonomy and privacy for convenience. That's what technology is, Ms. Kantor. A concession to laziness and the devaluing of human effort." 

He goes on

"A device that you carry with you everywhere you go, a device that monitors and watches you, is no the same as one that sites in your house and plays music or dries your hair."

So not all technology is bad, but some decidedly is. 
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