Title: Verify
Author: Joel Charbonneau
Publication Date: September 24, 2019
Publisher: HarperTeen
Format: Edelweiss eARC

Click For Goodreads Summary

Meri Beckley lives in a world without lies. When she turns on the news, she hears only the facts. When she swipes the pages of her online textbooks, she reads only the truth. When she looks at the peaceful Chicago streets, she feels the pride everyone in the country feels about the era of unprecedented hope and prosperity over which the government presides.

But when Meri’s mother is killed, Meri suddenly has questions that no one else seems to be asking. And when she tries to uncover her mother’s state of mind in her last weeks, she finds herself drawn into a secret world full of facts she’s never heard and a history she didn’t know existed.

Suddenly, Meri is faced with a choice between accepting the “truth” she has been taught or embracing a world the government doesn’t want anyone to see—a world where words have the power to change the course of a country, and the wrong word can get Meri killed.

Goodreads Amazon Book Depository

---

---

As a writer and a reader, I find the idea of taking words away to be both thrilling and terrifying.

On the one hand … less words to search in the Rolodex in your head when you’re trying to come up with the perfect word. And if I’m honest, I usually just call everything a “thingy” anyway. But on the other hand … words are beautiful, fragile things that deserve to be cherished and protected and how dare you. Obviously, I’m a little conflicted.

Verify is a world along the lines of Fahrenheit 451, where those in charge seek to change the narrative simply by controlling words. Control the words, and you control the past and the future.

And if that idea isn’t terrifying, I don’t know what is. This book was comped to Scythe, which instantly caught my attention (because duh). Besides which, I’m always up for a good YA dystopian romp into a future that I sorely hope doesn’t come true. In the end, though, Verify was a solid idea, but it just didn’t quite deliver what I was hoping for.

I think it would have a solid appeal to its target audience (being YA readers) and maybe particularly those who don’t read a ton of dystopia. Maybe younger teens who are just coming up into the world of YA dystopia.

As someone who is an old crone and loves the genre, though, this book relied a little too heavily on common tropes and cliches that I didn’t feel like it brought anything particularly new to the table. For that reason, this review isn’t going to be particularly long. Sorry?

❧ This provides a nice introduction to dystopia for those who haven’t visited the genre much before, more along the lines of Fahrenheit 451, but something a modern teen might more easily relate to.

It was a pretty easy read, easier to get into where someone might struggle with Ray Bradbury. Which, I mean, you should totally read Fahrenheit 451 anyway, but teens are stubborn, and sometimes you have to build them up to things and then pretend it was their idea all along. Oh yes, I know how this game is played.

❧ This world sets up a really compelling potential future that’s not too hard to see how we end up there.

I mean, in more time than the book gives, in my opinion, but still. Humans have always struggled with censorship, and it seems like a hot button issue right now. What are most people afraid of? The government lying to them. Which, news flash, it does a lot, because it’s the government. And we’re peons.

I’ve really just always loved the idea of those who control the books/words control the past, and those who control the past, control the future.

It’s the same concept as the winners write history, right? We’re still trying to correct obvious fallacies in the history books that we’ve known were incorrect for decades, and it’s still nearly impossible to do, because they’re so entrenched. So what’s a little nudging to make the past something more palatable, something more in line with what the government wants you to think, hm? It’s a creepy thought.

❧ I really liked the idea of an Underground Railroad for books and readers.

Just so you know, if anything like this goes down in real life, I will build one of these. Y’all can come chill at my house, read some good books in my bunkers, and break at least three laws while you’re here. I’ll even let you choose which three. Just no blood on the books, please and thank you.

There were only two real problems I had with this notion. First, 99% of people gave up their books willingly? Even the rich?

Because I know at least 30 people right off the top of my head whose books you’d have to pry from their cold, dead hands … and I guess that’s a possibility, but in a town this small, someone would notice that all the bookish people were dead and the library staff has mysteriously vanished.

Problem two: there’s no black market for books.

Let’s be honest … I don’t care how Big Brother the government becomes, there will be a black market of books if they become a high-risk commodity. Someone is saving all the first editions and rare prints and making bank off this fiasco. (Hint: it’s probably my husband.)

❧ The book moves along at a pretty fast clip. Despite being very predictable in places, it moved along at a pace that kept me invested and not bored.

Sure, there were places it dragged, but what book doesn’t have that to some degree? I never considered DNFing it or putting it down and letting it stew for a while. I was caught up in the mystery and wanted answers, too.

❧ The timeline here was way too skewed. I spent most of the book just trying to work out in my brain how everything is supposed to have taken place in this amount of time.

This dystopian world, for example? It’s only been 70 years since they started erasing words from the lexicon, which is … problematic. That’s barely a lifetime at this point, which means people are still alive who remember before that. Ostensibly, that first generation would have still used those words with their kids and told the accurate histories, because … well, that’s how culture and life works. I’m sorry. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This whole book takes place over the span of two or three days (I can’t remember which), and that is even more problematic, because I’m just not buying that.

When I first learned, at a tender young age, that my grandparents didn’t have a TV until they were already adults with children … I had to sit down. My poor, young heart broke for them. How did they possibly survive without watching The Land Before Time at least twice a day?! So I just can’t believe that a teenager learns about a big government conspiracy one day and the next is gung-ho with everything and taking charge. And even if she was … who would trust her? And why? This is one shoddy revolution.

❧ There’s an insta-love romance in this book, and I’m just not feeling it.

Not in general, but especially not in this book. Remember when I said the timeline of this book is a few days? Yeah. I hate to be that person, but … you’re not in love, folks. That’s just not how this works.

❧ One of the big emotional struggles in this book for the protagonist, Meri, is that she lost her mother. But all I can say is GOOD RIDDANCE … and I think that’s the wrong reaction?

I think we’re supposed to sympathize with Meri on this journey as we chase the truth about her mother, and then maybe sympathize with her mother eventually? But I did not. Not even slightly. I found nothing redeemable or likable about her mother, and Meri herself sort of proved that. There were no heart-warming, endearing flashbacks. No, there was a constant narrative of Meri remembering how her mother berated her, put her down, and made her feel not good enough.

Meri’s father certainly isn’t winning any Father of the Year awards, either, and I’m glad he didn’t have a huge role in the story.

I want to say we’re meant to feel sorry for him, too, but I just am so over him. He’s a crap father all the way through, and then an emotionally manipulative one and I just … what happened to good parents in YA?

❧ Meri makes a lot of really stupid and careless decisions, which frustrated me to no end.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice … also shame on you. Fool me three times … why are you like this?! Some of it I can forgive, because she’s a teen and we’ve all been there and, wow, yeah, I did stupid things. But there were so many times Meri did something that obviously could have gotten someone else killed, and the thought seemed to never have once crossed her mind, when it was the first thing I thought as she was deciding to do it.

❧ The ending of this book was pretty abrupt, sort of in media res, like there was supposed to be more but they cut it at a random point.

It’s very much like, “I have a plan.” Aaaaand roll credits. Well, not quite, but that’s sort of how I felt when I got there, because I expected it to have wrapped up … something? But nothing was really concluded in this book. I’m not even sure what the characters have accomplished overall.

Chat With Me

What’s one of your favorite dystopian tropes that you love to see?