Sara Saif's Reviews > The Extinction Trials

The Hunger Games meets Jurassic Park and they make a half-baked baby that possesses the remotest resemblance to each parent, is annoying as shit and makes you wonder if it was even necessary for it to be born.

I’m not really surprised at how much exaggeration an attractive book cover, a grand title and an equally dramatic and well-put synopsis can create. The book, sadly, doesn’t always live up to the resulting expectations.

I have a very distinct impression of The Extinction Trials after finishing it and I’ve already expressed what it is: HALF-BAKED. This book is half-baked, it’s so under-cooked I’m a world-class chef by comparison.

Hunger Games? BITE me. Jurassic Park? Nice try.

For starters, I found the narration bland. And that, naturally, made everything else bland as well, the characters, their relationships, the story. It wasn’t descriptive enough, it wasn’t detailed enough, it just wasn’t good enough. All telling and no showing.

-The book would be like, ‘this situation is very dangerous’ and I would not feel it, catch my drift? It didn’t make me feel. It told me to feel a certain way and expected that I would but I didn’t because I wasn’t convinced.
-Similarly, if we look at the character dynamics, there is a half-baked (that word again) relationship between two people and I say that because again, it wasn’t developed at all but I was supposed to think it was and care. After slight hints and a long nothing, both of the people were like, “oh, I feel more about this person than I did before…” and I was like, do you really?

Another, rather significant instance of this blandness is the shoddy world-building. That’s right, you heard me. I said shoddy. It’s poorly built and that’s infuriating double-time because the book boasts of being similar to the Hunger Games. Gurl, you can’t hold a match to how impressively the Hunger Games’ world was constructed. Here, though, even though it’s entire continents we’re talking about, the sense of grandness of scale is evidently lacking. There is also no graspable sense of surroundings, the few descriptions we get of the Shelter and housing blocks and tree-top houses was woefully inadequate in conjuring the imagery in my mind.

Moreover, it lacks some serious backstory. Dinosaurs exist, deal with it, is what the book appears to say. I caught a single line, ONE SOLITARY LINE, in the entire book that sounded like a potential backstory bit and it said something like this: humans evolved on one continent, Earthasia, while Dinosaurs evolved in another: Piloria. So I’m guessing this isn’t a futuristic dystopian world gone to extra hell, it’s just the way it is? And this by the way, comes up after reading like 2/3 of the book.

Also, and more weirdly, even though these people aren’t primitive (they have weapons and buildings and electronics), they have next to no knowledge about dinosaurs? I mean, okay, we’re talking about a vastly different world altogether but that sounds so far-fetched to me. How old is this world that when we get to the current situation of diminishing space, food and power, people still have virtually no idea or knowledge about dinosaurs? Only for the past nine years, since the start of the “Trials” (which I will get to in sweet time) have they begun to get some sort of information about how the dinosaurs live? Which makes NO sense to me because clearly they already know the names of all the dinosaurs! WHAT is the deal?

And to make it even more confusing, somewhere in the beginning a scientist announces on behalf of all the others to the population that they’ve discovered the building blocks of life, DNA and they can use this information to get hold of the dinosaur DNA and manufacture some sort of disease that only targets dinosaurs. HOLD THE FUCK UP. You know the names of all dinosaurs, but you don’t know anything about their anatomy or their intelligence, you claim you’ve only just figured out what a blasted DNA is and yet you boast you can manufacture a disease that can kill creatures of a specific DNA straight up. WHERE, IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY, DO YOU EVEN LIVE?

Now, these awe-inspiring trials. The purpose of these, for the past nine years since they’d been commenced was always to help the people of Earthasia to survive, finding new food sources, mostly and this year, it’s egg-hunting and all the DNA shit so they can wipe out the dinosaurs and take over Piloria as that would give humanity plenty of space, food and other resources. Right. So, why are these trials “trials” again? Why aren’t they an ‘expedition’? These are yearly trips and the survival of humanity potentially hinges on them so why the effing heck did they make this a all-serious competition? Not only is this a YA cliché and pointless here, it’s incredibly counter-productive, not to mention colossally stupid.

• These people know nothing about dinosaurs.
• All past expeditions have less than a 10% survival rate.
• Piloria is an entire fucking continent.
• Charting the terrain requires food, supplies such as medicine, clothing, weapons and information about what they’re facing.

So how is sending a 100 people with no useful bit of knowledge, weaponry and a whole lot of ration they can’t spare, pitted against each other in a competition to find whatever they’re looking for a clever idea? Shouldn’t they be going for, oh I don’t know, stealth? And team work? Okay, so a hundred people cover a lot of ground, okay, they are eventually gonna divide themselves into teams, and okay sending a whole lot of people to what is essentially a suicide mission once every year is a great idea in the grand scheme of things (the less people, the better) but why do you have to make it a “trial”? That makes it unnecessarily sinister and severe.
Some of them are sure as heck going to turn on each other, which again defeats the purpose of working together and trying to survive and be stealthy in a place full of monsters that can smell a cut and chase you for miles and miles. Which happens here. Not only did the Stipulators not give them any coherent bit of information they didn’t even bother to ask the ‘contestants’ to be discreet and quiet and perhaps not kill each other?

They add this tournament/arena-fighting/trials/games shit in every book now even if it makes no sense.

The main protagonist’s name is “Stormchaser Knux”….
……………………………………………………………
………………………………………………….
……………………………………….
……………………………..
……………………..
………………
…………
…..
…
.
While the second one’s name is Lincoln.

Stormchaser has violet eyes. Sure, it’s a strange world people can have violet eyes, yeah? Except the color is apparently unusual even for people who come from far reaches of Earthasia so she’s most likely the only one with eyes this color. She has no parents, mother died a few years ago, never met her father, her mother didn’t allow mention of him. Usually that’s a sign the father is alive and evil. So who else could have violet eyes but the chief Stipulator sending a hundred people to die on a deadly continent? This guy gives her weird looks throughout the book, this coupled with the fact that they both have the same “unusual” eyes, it still took someone else politely mentioning it for her to realize that this guy may be her father. Not the ripest apple on the tree, this girl.

The moral dilemma going side by side with all this, was honestly not appealing. You need the space, you need the food, you need new resources, medicine and a shitload of things your continent has run out of. People have been dying of a Plague (without being quarantined?) so colonizing Piloria is possibly the only choice they’ve got left. But noooo. Storm’s like, we’ll just leave the dinosaurs alone and let the humans all die and suffer. If you’ve got any bright ideas, girl, humanity is listening.
However, I am interested to know what the writer’s solution to this is.

If there’s an no-man’s land filled with dangerous creatures and certain death at every step, chances are there’s a lone survivor living there for years and years who’ll conveniently show up and save your ass from being eaten by said dangerous creatures. Hello, Kong Skull Island.

The guy had a proper reason to be there but I was annoyed by everything in this book.

And finally, let me talk about how abrupt and anti-climactic the ending is. The last couple of contestants are subjected to a pointless ‘trial’ yet again which involves swimming, climbing a cliff and throwing knives at people. This particular part screamed ‘half-baked’. It’s was such a sloppy, spur-of-the-moment, ‘put there just for thrills’ thing, it made me eye-roll extra hard. The winner found a loophole so the losers could win as well which only just proved the pointlessness of it all.

Suffice to say, I’m pretty pissed at this book.

P.S: Grudgingly giving it 3 stars which is actually 2 point something because the writing was bearable and I read this quick.