bookshelves of doom: Stung -- Bethany Wiggins

Stung begins:

I don't remember going to sleep. All I remember is waking up here—a place as familiar as my own face.

At least, it should be.

Fiona Tarsis wakes up in her bedroom, but it isn't like she remembers it: it's bleached and dusty, unused and mostly-empty. And it's in slightly better shape than the rest of the house, which looks like it was looted and abandoned years ago.

She has an unfamiliar tattoo on her hand.

When she looks in a mirror, she realizes that she's lost even more time than she imagined: one of her last memories is of her thirteenth birthday, and she's clearly years older than that now.

Also, her science-geek twin brother seems to have turned into a musclebound, possibly-cannibalistic, ragey-monster type. After narrowly escaping sororicide, Fiona heads out into this new, dead world, in search of safety... and answers.

While I liked the basic premise of Stung—bees die out, which basically causes the apocalypse (no bees, no food; no food, people freak out; scientists try to save the bees and accidentally create a rage virus; the haves create a governmental structure that is focused on their own survival, and to hell with the have-nots)—I couldn't get over my issues with the main character. The issues, though, are somewhat spoilery, so if you're planning on reading it, I'd suggest skipping the rest of the post.

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Fiona is more of a MacGuffin than a person, more an object acted upon by the other characters than a actor in her own right. She doesn't know it until three-quarters through the book—she doesn't know much of anything, actually, and she doesn't show a lot of interest in learning more—but she's being hunted by two groups of people: those in the medical community, who believe that she's the key to ending the rage-plague, and those in the governor's employ, who want to preserve the status quo by killing her.

Some of the plotting was hard to buy, in that it seems completely crazy to me that the scientists, in order to SAVE HER LIFE, would chuck her out into an unfamiliar world with no supplies, no training, no information, and no protector. THEY LITERALLY WAKE HER UP FROM A FOUR-YEAR LONG COMA, SHOVE HER INTO A LAUNDRY BASKET, AND DUMP HER ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WALL. Their reasoning is that she'll be safer from the governor there, but... wowza. Also, I thought it was weird that she was up and running around so quickly after such a long-term coma, but there was some hand-waving about the regenerative properties of the bee serum stuff, so I guess (?) that dealt with any muscle atrophy issues?

But back to Fiona—who, by the way, is affectionately called 'Fotard' by her former neighbor-turned-militia-man—as I said, in almost every situation, she reacts rather than acts. Which, honestly, might be a good thing: because in almost every case, when she acts, she does something that puts her life (or someone else's life) at risk. Some of that inanity, I guess, could be chalked up to her brain being coma-fuzzy, to her lack of life experience over the last few years, or to the instalove she's enjoying with the aforementioned militia-man... but that didn't make it any easier to read about.

TL;DR: My favorite thing about this book was the cover.

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Author page.

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Amazon.

Publisher.

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Book source: Review copy via Netgalley.