Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Spell Number 2: Unidentified

Rae Mariz enters school with her science fiction Unidentified. Where everything is monitored and everyone is expected to become entertainment for the rest of the world. At school.
Once a mall, the Game is where students perform for the sponsors, corporations that use the Game to create new fads in the real world, and choose brands, the popular students, to make their products stand out more. Main character Katey, aka Kid goes along with the reason the sponsors created until anti-corporates, or the Unidentified, make a scene by throwing a dummy down from a railing.
Kid is simply one of the many students that play the Game, and even at the end there was no clear reason why the main character would be her. She doesn't join the Unidentified, she isn't the only one who knows of both existences and never cared about either side of the extreme coin.
While the cover creates a sense of intrigue similar to the Bar Code Tattoo, the story inside lacks the flair. Kid and her two friends created a band, but when we are introduced to the story, the third member, Ari keeps flaking out on the group as she rushes to become a brand, but continues to appear in the story, for a reason I cannot understand. It seems the word friend doesn't mean much in this story.
When the plot added the Unidentified, they stood out to the point it was unnatural. If this were Mariz's objective, then the execution was lacking. There was no smooth transaction for adding them into the plot, and the only time Kid ever talked, well they talked plenty, but in a useful manner, was far to the end.
There was a number of unnecessary characters such as knowing the names of the brands, or what they represented that the number o
f names to memorize becomes a hindrance. There were times that I even forgot Kid, let alone her real name.
Oh, and the ever common cliche of being a girl with multiple guys that like you. Mariz focused on how Kid felt, naturally since she's the main character, but not enough on the other end to actually result in the how the book ended.