Author: Cecelia Ahern
Publication Date: April 5, 2016
Published: Feiwel and Friends
My Rating:
You will be punished…
Celestine North lives a perfect life. She’s a model daughter and sister, she’s well-liked by her classmates and teachers, and she’s dating the impossibly charming Art Crevan.
But then Celestine encounters a situation where she makes an instinctive decision. She breaks a rule and now faces life-changing repercussions. She could be imprisoned. She could be branded. She could be found flawed.
In her breathtaking young adult debut, bestselling author Cecelia Ahern depicts a society where perfection is paramount and flaws lead to punishment. And where one young woman decides to take a stand that could cost her everything.
A friend of the family is taken from her home and branded with an F, for flawed. That was the first time she witnessed an arrest of a flawed, the arrest of someone who she believed was just as perfect and pure as she was, and now she doesn’t know what to think. Is the government wrong about what is right and what is wrong? So, she takes a stand, and does something she believes is right, even though it’s against the law, to aide a flawed, but an elderly man needed help and she couldn’t just sit and watch, so with MUCH hesitation, she helped him to a seat and within seconds she was taken off the bus and thrown into the reality of the world she believed to be perfect.
Once the elderly man started coughing on the bus, I made the Rosa Parks connection, because this novel is definitely inspired by her. All Rosa Parks wanted to do was sit down because she was tired, and she got thrown in jail, but she started a movement, a revolution, and that’s what Celestine did. She helped someone who needed help, regardless of his flaws, and she paid the price was branded, and now everyone knows what kind of person she is. The flaws are forced to wear red bands on their wrist, they are publicly humiliated, every day, just like African-Americans were and unfortunately still are. The Rosa Parks, connection is definitely my favorite aspect of this novel, and I did like Celestine as a protagonist, although she is unwilling and too afraid to help others in her situation, I liked her. I think I pitied her more than I liked her, because what Judge Crevan did to her, and how he just turned on her, was just horrible. This man used to come to her house for dinner, and she’s the love of his son’s life and he just did some really fucked up things to her. However, Celestine does have the support of her family and a few others who believe she was wrongly accused and just disagree with the flawed system as a whole, so she isn’t alone, but even that doesn’t help.
Overall, the novel itself is okay, I won’t say it’s great or good, because I don’t think it is, but that’s just my opinion. I did like that Celestine wasn’t a girl on fire, no offense to Katniss, but it’s nice to see a girl that isn’t a warrior physically, but is one mentally, or is at least trying to become one mentally, she is heading in that direction, she just doesn’t know it yet. I give this novel 3 stars!
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