The Ninja Reader

The Short Guide of World Domination (Purely theoretical, of course) Step One : Find a nation that is ravaged by war, famine, a plague, or, ideally, all three at once. The more desolate, the more desperate people will be, and no-one will question your authority when you come promising peace. Step Two : Stand by your promises, at least for the beginning. Always make people love you, because that way they will be less likely to follow some young philosopher who sees through your shit and tries to lead a revolution. Step Three : If you want to restore the economy and repopulate the country, do not segregate the two sexes. Economise. Do not waste precious resources teaching girls music and art and history and extreme feminist teachings if you'll strap them down to a table and make them give you babies as soon as they turn eighteen. This creates anger and unrest, not to mention that you will be forced to kill them at some point. Focus on brainwashing them. Select the most intelligent and ambitious ones to serve on your team, and make sure they're sleazy enough to sell out the ones weaker than them, but too cowardly to lead a revolution. Step Four : MAKE THEM LOVE YOU! That means you should wait for at least twenty or so years before even attempting to create a privileged caste. Not only you will, by then, have enough resources to squander on ski slopes and pools in the desert, but the people will be brainwashed enough to believe you are doing it for their own good. Step Five : And for goodness' sake, when you want some booty, don't send the whole army to catch you one. Bad form, man!-----------------------------------------------------------------------Alright, so maybe I should attempt to write a review and not something for sitz and giggles. I feel kinda bad - since I avoided requesting The Goddess Test simply isn't that strong of a book, and I think the main reason is the genre it was bumped in. Rather, the expectations of that genre.YA dystopian is not expected to be really dark and gritty. Sure, there are bloody battles, but when it comes down to the nitty gritty of it, authors really shy away from revealing true darkness. Take Eve, for example - she ends up in an all-boys camp, yet there is only one attempt at rape (even if those guys are in their teen years and are expected to have raging hormones). She managed to get to the end of the book with her virtue intact, even if she does fall in love with a guy. Why? Old world values shouldn't matter in the wild. If there is anything post-apocalyptic fiction has taught us, it is that when facing death, people generally drop pretenses because they can't afford them.Eve is never certain about her motivation, nor is she particularly intelligent. Maybe at the beginning of the book I could have bought it, since she was raised to be useless in the wild, but she spends a lot of time in a camp with a bunch of guys and the most useful thing she learns there is to swim. Instead of upping up her survivor skills, learning to light a fire and camp and hunt and cook, she spends her time teaching the obligatory cutesy-pie child figures to read. Gag. Me.If you want to write dystopian, then write dystopian. Don't chicken out of the dark stuff just because teens are supposed to be such fragile children. I'm sure that this book will become a bestseller. Really, I do. It has all the markings of it. There are even some really nice moments. But in terms of realistic characters, I really couldn't suspend my disbelief. Maybe the whole genre of YA dystopian should just disappear. After all, putting YA in front of something almost always guarantees that it'll be a dilluted mess.Note: A copy of this book wa provided by the publishers via Net Galley.