Wednesday, September 29, 2021

Book Review: "Lawless" by Jeffrey Salane

SPOIL-FREE SUMMARY

M Freeman has spent her young life rather sheltered as she has been homeschooled and raised by her mother. But she knows she wants to get into a special school called “Lawless” where her father went as a child. Now that her father has passed on, it means more than ever.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

M is smart and eager to learn but slightly naive. She seems to be rather singleminded, as she has put all her hopes going to a school she knows nothing about.

Zara is M's guardian. The older girl is sarcastic and cynical. For the most part, she doesn't seem to really care about M.

Merlyn is a young man who starts school the same time as M. He meets her on the ride to the airport and is rather geeky. He is good with tech.

Cal is a handsome blonde boy whom M seems to have a slight crush on. But revelations cause her not to know how to feel about him.

Mrs. Watts is a teacher and ends up being on M's final exam quest.

PACING

The pacing of the story is good. We get M's interview and then her trip home. We may not jump right into the action but there is enough mystery to move the story along and make the reader curious. Even when M gets home there are twists. By the time she makes it to the airport and the action starts, I was kept interested.

THE FULBRIGHTS

A shadowy organization called the Fulbrights are a threat to the Lawless school. M meets them in the beginning at the airport. Oddly enough, M sees them seem to shimmer. Not much is told to M about them until near the end of the book.

WHY ME?-SPOILERS

From the plane ride M ends up asleep and then awakes in the cock pit. She has to land the plane because there is no pilot. Although she thought she saw someone.

I was surprised that M didn't go crazy to Zara or at least to the first adult she met off the plane. I would have been furious. She is just a child, and this is the kind of organization that they're running?

It wasn't even Lawless involved in this madness. She is told someone think's she is special (and perhaps worth testing...) so they just look incompetent. And when M points out she saw a man they blow her off and call her crazy. They just snarkily tell her they landed the plane remotely.

I would be thinking this had all been a mistake and I needed to get out of there the first opportunity. Or at least I would second guess myself. But M only seems annoyed. Not furious.

THAT WAS LUCKY-SPOILERS

When M is required to go to Orientation she loses her ID so she sneaks her way in. This involves getting creative and ending up in the ceiling. I suppose it would make sense if all she needed to do was hear the information given and not be seen as present. But she ends up crashing through the ceiling.

Instead of falling to her death she ends up getting caught in some wires. I found it rather silly that she only escaped death by being lucky. I get that the ending was clever, when the head of the school introduces her. But it felt rather stupid.

They knew her ID would have been stolen since she was the mark, and should would have to risk her life. What would have happened if there had been no wires? Oops, I guess we're having a funeral after orientation, guys.

M'S MOTHER

M admits her relationship with her mother isn't really good. It's very formal and when M leaves home, she doesn't even get to talk to her mother alone.

Then it's revealed she has gone missing while M is at school. But she makes a return while M is on her final exam quest. I actually liked this scene.

For once, M shows some emotion, arguing and yelling at her mom. She rightly gets mad at not being told what's going on and explains how worried she was. But this is all cut short and we don't learn anything more about her mother.

M'S FATHER

M's father died in a plane crash, leaving M with a moonrock necklace. She learns that he was very smart and actually invented a cypher used at the school.

SECRETS REVEALED-SPOILERS

In the beginning, M believes both of her parents are art historians. All she really knows about her dad was he attended a school called Lawless. But when she arrives at the school she learns the truth: her father was a master art thief and her mother a con artist. Turns out only a graduate of the school can speak about it, so her mother could not. Only her father, and he passed away.

Eventually M learns that her father was killed, his death wasn't an accident.

SEND HER HOME-SPOILERS

There is a scene halfway though the story where M is threatened to be sent home. I didn't really think she would be sent away, but perhaps the scene had to happen so we could see Zara defending M. And perhaps to see how ruthless and uncaring people like Mrs. Watts were.

Later, Zara reveals that Ronin are those who fail at Lawless. They spend the rest of their life on a watch list, being kept on lock down. Perhaps Zara was thinking about how bad this would be for M, although I don't really understand why she cared.

MYSTERIES GALORE

Various mysteries are presented throughout the story, which helps with the pacing. We start with an empty envelope and meet Zara, who is obviously not what she seems. And when M arrives at the school, it she learns the truth about her parents, all the while her witnessing an adult on the plane is brushed off. No one seems honest. Eventually she even gets a map that has secret information on it. It's the story's strong point.

THE PROBLEM WITH M

I think the main problem with M is that she never doubts her decision to come to lawless. She never thinks, what am I doing here? Or, these people are crazy, I can't trust them. Instead she stays rather naive, assuming that Lawless are the good guys and Fulbrights are the bad ones.

After all, they just steal stuff. No big deal. I was annoyed at her shallowness. Did she ever stop and think that maybe stealing was bad? Maybe it was motivated by greed? What if when stealing, someone got in the way? What if you had to hurt them, or kill them in order to complete the theft? Could she do that? Should she? But M never thinks of these very likely scenarios.

SCHOOL LIFE-SPOILERS

I thought some of the ideas were interesting. Like M being made a mark on her first day and losing all of her items.

Also the idea of “the Box” as some super scifi place where you coud be transported anyway was unique. I just thought M's reaction to it should have been more awed. I felt like I had been transported to Star Trek. How on earth did they get such technology? The room wasn't all an illusion as it actually transformed physically. But I didn't understand how it worked at all.

The jacket with the bells on it was interesting as well, and I liked having to watch M and her teammates work together to get their target.

WE'RE FRIENDS NOW

M admits early on that she is a loner. As such, I would have expected her to have a hard time making friends. But there are no awkward moments. No misunderstandings, no lack of social skills. I wanted to see her form a same-sex relationship and then try one with a boy and realize it's not the same at all.

But there was no friendship process exactly. She has teammates when they have to tag a student, but besides some sarcasm traded there wasn't any sense of relationships developing and the difficulties involved.

I suppose the bulk of the story is focused on the separate tasks and adding mystery. So the relationship angle is completely neglected. It's unfortunate.

TRUST NO ONE?

M gets betrayed by one character who isn't a friend. Then she starts to almost like a character even though she was told not to trust them. In the end she gets betrayed but this character comes back and helps her.

M thinks things are not black and white. But I just didn't care about the betrayal because I barely knew the character who did the betraying. And I was starting to get annoyed at the excuses being made for them.

CAL'S MISTAKE-SPOILERS

During their team mission, Cal ends up using the jacket of bells on their target, which electrocutes them. He does this all with ease, smiling when it happens. This creeps out the other kids, especially M, who doesn't understand who he is.

Cal gets reprimanded and the whole school shuns him for a bit. Because thieves steal, but they never hurt anyone. Ever. As illogical as that seems.

In reality it's not hard to believe a school that specializes in breaking laws would have a subset of students who would laugh at the idea of some sort of moral code.

THE MASTERS

M learns about a group of leaders in Lawless called the Masters. Turns out her father was a member and so was Mrs. Watts, who seemed to have a history with him.

A BLACK HOLE

In the 1600s, a man named Jonathan Wild was known as the king of thieves. When finally imprisoned he read science books that lead him to the idea of black holes. When M asks why, Zara says that Wild was crazy.

His followers eventually divided into the fulbrights and the lawless. It felt rather vague and unnecessary. As if the author felt that the story needed a bigger threat than two criminal institutions fighting each other. He he had to throw in a way to threaten the whole universe.

CLIMAX

M ends up returning to Lawless where she discovers everyone is on break. There she meets Fox Lawless and retrieves her painting. But it turns out everyone is evil (big surprise) but M gets help from a surprising source to escape.

CONCLUSION

The story itself is an intesting idea that's not executed well. A secret school where kids learn to be criminals. And yet it somehow falls flat.

It's strong points are in the pacing and the suspense. But the pay off isn't always fulfilling and often times, the reaction feels overblown.

As for the weak points...firstly, the character of M is shallow and lacks any depth. She wants to go to a school she knows nothing about and when she gets there, never once doubts her goal. Even with suspicous behavior around her. Perhaps this story would have been better told as a YA, where the reality of immoral behavior could have been addressed, and not ignored.

Secondly, the relationships or lack of them. All other characters are just outlines with vague characteristics (Merlyn the geek, Cal the mysterious cute guy) without any history. And yet I was supposed to believe they were all friends with M.

M doesn't even have a relationship with her own mother. You would think this would affect her own social skills. Because I didn't know any of the characters I never cared about them. Not even when one is kidnapped and another betrays M.

I give “Lawless” two and half stars.

No comments:

Post a Comment