Title: The Scorpion Rules Series: Prisoners of Peace #1
Author: Erin Bow
Published: September 22, 2015
Genre(s): Science Fiction
Page Count: 400
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Greta is a Duchess and a Crown Princess. She is also a Child of Peace, a hostage held by the de facto ruler of the world, the great Artificial Intelligence, Talis. This is how the game is played: if you want to rule, you must give one of your children as a hostage. Start a war and your hostage dies.
The system has worked for centuries. Parents don’t want to see their children murdered.
Greta will be free if she can make it to her eighteenth birthday. Until then she is prepared to die with dignity, if necessary. But everything changes when Elián arrives at the Precepture. He’s a hostage from a new American alliance, and he defies the machines that control every part of their lives—and is severely punished for it. His rebellion opens Greta’s eyes to the brutality of the rules they live under, and to the subtle resistance of her companions. And Greta discovers her own quiet power.
Then Elián’s country declares war on Greta’s and invades the Precepture, taking the hostages hostage. Now the great Talis is furious, and coming himself to deliver punishment. Which surely means that Greta and Elián will be killed...unless Greta can think of a way to break all the rules.
After unashamedly guzzling The Scorpion Rules in a single morning like the human manifestation of a parched desert caught by a freak rainstorm…I am just not okay. I. Am. Not. Okay.
Phew.
The Scorpion Rules is, candidly, not a book I was likely to have picked up without encouragement—post-apocalyptic humanity sends its children as hostages (i.e. tributes?) to isolated schools as part of a ritualized program intended to engender world peace. I mean, it does sound like a good concept, but as a reader who got extremely burnt out by YA dystopian fiction during its oversaturated heyday circa 2011-2014, I could have just as easily skipped this and never felt a moment’s regret.
Me, to myself, reading the jacket copy: yawn.
Me, to myself, after finishing the book, rocking quietly back and forth on my closet floor: what the fuck what the fuck what the fuuuuuuuck.
Honestly, I’m not sure the best marketing team in the universe could have described this novel to me in a way that accurately captures every single layer and color of brilliant, painful, surprising raw talent Erin Bow shows here. It’s a subtle and yet blindingly powerful story. I didn’t even notice the havoc being wreaked upon my emotions until, with my own two eyeballs, I was watching adults begin to torture a literal child on a globally broadcast livestream with all the chill of a seasoned director shooting a potential Oscar-worthy film—and then witnessed another literal child throw themself on top of them in an idiotic but fearlessly noble act of futile self-sacrifice.
That hits you different as an adult reader, I think, because the juxtaposition of brutality and innocence is so bitter once you’ve had a few years to stretch your legs in the reality of The Real World.
(Side note: this also hit me especially hard because, raised as an evangelical Christian, I was literally indoctrinated since birth into the hivemind that it was inevitable that I would be asked to renounce my god, and that I needed to be prepared to die a horrific death, if necessary, rather than do so. Conditioning children to martyr themselves like that is fucking barbaric, and maybe you don’t realize it until you’re sitting in your clean, air-conditioned office on a summer morning, reading a lovely YA novel about…children martyring themselves with calm acceptance. Fuck. I am not okay!)
The characters here, the Children of Peace, are so, so innocent, but so brave. Every day, they live down the knowledge that they may die. And they know that if they die, it’s because their parents valued fighting a war more than they valued their own child. It’s such a heavy burden to put on a five-year-old. So these children, they herd goats and plant pumpkins and steal kisses underneath the Saskatchewan stars…but they’re dying. Each person in the prison-school is dying, at a different rate, and in a different way—but dying all the same. And dying not least because they know that if they do manage to see adulthood, it will only be to send their own child to take their place. Another death, multiplied down the line.
I don’t think I’m going to manage to make much sense in this “review,” and that’s fine. The Scorpion Rules has been out for a few years, so if you’re genuinely here for a sense of what the book is about, I’m sure there are no shortage of fully coherent, thoughtful takes on this novel and its sequel (which I will read once I’ve regained my bearings). I’m mostly here today to YELL about this book, which is unlike anything I’ve ever read. It subverts expectations in so many small and large ways. Any time I thought I understood what Bow was attempting to do, I realized quickly that I had miscalculated. This is not a YA novel about saving the world from ignorant humanity, nor is it a novel about rebelling against tyrannical robot overlords. It’s something different. Something gentler, yet not soft either. The Scorpion Rules is (if I may be permitted to get a little religious on main) a story about the healing power of love…and also about sacrificing one’s very self because of that love, and for a greater good that perhaps none in your lifetime will ever fully appreciate.
To reiterate: I am not okay!!!
I’M NOT SORRY AND I’LL NEVER BE SORRY. Seriously, though, your description of reading the jacket copy and then reading the book was my exact experience, except I was reading it during the height of the YA dystopia period so I was, if possible, even more certain I knew what was coming. But WOW I did not.
I am thrilllllllllled you read and enjoyed this — Erin Bow is a terrific author and I’m constantly evangelizing for this series, but it can be a hard sell now that everyone’s tired of YA dystopia!