Award-winning YA dystopian sci-fi from P.J. Sky.

I first heard of this book in the Twitter writing community, where I saw it being posted regularly in #writerslift threads and its premise immediately caught my attention. After a while I saw that the author, P.J. Sky, had the Kindle version up on a free promotion and I took the opportunity to claim it for later. And it has taken me quite a long time to get to, to be honest. I don’t have a Kindle of my own (my wife does, however) and I don’t really like to read books on my phone (probably because I’m looking at it all day anyway!) But over a period of months, I had nevertheless acquired a number of free Kindle ebooks from authors in the writing community, and after finishing Children of Time, I felt it was high time I actually got down to reading some of them. So I borrowed my wife’s Kindle and loaded up A Girl Called Ari.

Blurb

In a distant future… A world divided… A walled city in a devastated wasteland… A struggle for power becomes a struggle to survive… with friends like these, who needs enemies?

How would you survive beyond the comfortable walls of your world? For Starla, a struggle for power becomes a struggle for survival when she finds herself on the wrong side of the wall. Fleeing her abductors and lost in the wasteland, she faces starvation, warring factions, bloodthirsty creatures, and the endless burning sun.

And then there’s Ari… who is she really? And can she really trust this girl from the wasteland to lead her back to the city gates?

One thing’s for sure, Starla’s once privileged life will never be the same…

Review

I have to admit here that I have never read a YA dystopia before, which on the one hand is weird considering the immense popularity of the genre, but at the same time not really surprising given my patchy reading history. My only experience of the broader genre is the movie adaptations of The Hunger Games, and A Girl Called Ari is clearly nothing like that in the slightest. So, I went right into this not really knowing what to expect.

My first impressions were that it gave me huge Mad Max vibes. Set in a post-apocalyptic future in what is evidently the Australian outback, the book really does lean heavily into that aesthetic, which is great. Except here you’ve got a massive, futuristic, high-tech walled city in the middle of the harsh wasteland wilderness. Those inside the city have easy lives with tight security at the expense of their freedom, and those outside have it hard, toiling away in the hot sun with little food or water and always at risk of death at the hands of bandits, mercenaries, dingoes and disease in their small lawless settlements. The people on the outside aren’t allowed into the city, whereas inside, dissent regularly results in exile. It’s a great concept, but I did feel that the world wasn’t quite as well realised as I’m used to. For instance, I would have liked to have seen more of the city at the start. There was also a slight niggle to do with an assumption one of the characters made about the outsiders that didn't really get explored in as much depth as I would have liked and it didn’t really come up again later in the story.

We’re quickly introduced to the two main characters: Starla, daughter of the city’s mayor who is kidnapped and taken outside the city walls; and Ari, an outsider who works in the salt mines. Inevitably, Ari and Starla meet and their arduous journey back to the city begins. Ari and Starla are really great characters, very well realised and fleshed out, with Ari being perhaps the more complex of the two. The journey of growth they share as they come to depend on one another for survival is satisfying and believable, and I think it’s this aspect of the book that I enjoyed the most.

There’s also something to say about writing accents in dialogue. It’s something I’ve seen come up in writing discussions - not about this book particularly - just in general, but this book embraces it wholeheartedly. Whether that’s desirable or not is entirely up to personal taste, and I certainly still found it readable. I’ve done it myself a little in From the Grave of the Gods, but after seeing it fully in action here, I may walk back from it in the future, as I can see the potential for confusion.

The pacing and action is fast and enjoyable, and this is helped by the short, punchy chapters. Although I did find some scenes a little disorienting. The prose was generally good, and flowed well, though repetitive in places, but I wasn’t too bothered by that.

Back to worldbuilding, towards the end we’re treated to a little more explanation of how the world came to be the way that it is and it was frustrating - in a good way - a real tease of more layers and hinting at that kind of wider story and deeper lore that I am all about. I wish there had been more space in this book to go a little further with it, but I understand why it remained relatively understated.

Overall it was a very enjoyable story and I’m glad I finally got around to reading it.