Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

"We all do what we have to in order to survive." ... The law that governs all of nature. The law that can be used to justify anything, if you can twist and warp the words to fit.

4.5 Stars. Every time Ava Reid puts pen to paper they find a way to shake me right to my very heart, and they’ve done it again here with Fable for the End of the World, a fantastic return to YA dystopia that's fresh and modern in its storytelling, with Reid's signature sharp prose and hands down one of the best utilizations of dual POV I’ve ever read. I’m so serious, I could do a whole thinkpiece on the dual POV writing in this book alone. When you read it, I hope you’ll get what I mean. The use of language itself on a technical level as a vehicle for the development of connections between characters is amazing.

First, let me say that I desperately hope that the young queer kids who need this story find their way to it. For those who are scared of what’s happening and what may be coming, something like Fable, wherein these girls are both in some way saved by their open, queer love and that they’re entirely unwilling to let go of that even when all outward signs point to that they should…that feels immeasurably important right now.

And speaking of things that feel important right now, one of my favorite recurring themes of Ava’s work is that there is strength in feeling “too much.� There is a strength in softness and a bravery in continuing to seek hope and love and kindness in a world that is bound and determined to beat you down. And here in Fable - a story about a very physical danger in this assassination Gauntlet - Inesa is no different. A literal lamb to the slaughter, there’s no training montage where she learns to pick up a gun and meet the assassin sent to kill her for a debt she never incurred in a moonlit showdown, but rather her true strength lies in her empathy.

Fable is also, of course, a YA dystopian and a clear love letter to The Hunger Games and Reid’s roots in THG fandom spaces. It’s genuinely such a delightful part of getting older to see - in real time - how our formative media is actually, truly formative. Reid shows how Suzanne Collins� story shaped them and their worldview and their own art and then grows up to say here is how your work contributed to the artist I am today and here is the art it inspired me to create, which I just think is SO COOL now that I’m 30 and no longer just studying art and its inspirations, but seeing it in real time with the things that were formative for me too. All of which I suppose is to say, my fellow fandom people - of any fandom - this is for us too.

That is not to say, however, that it is a clone, a copy, etc. of The Hunger Games. The Gauntlet in Fable and the Games in THG operate in fundamentally different ways and for vastly different reasons. Fable is about how a world rooted in debt and corporate oligarchies can fundamentally change the way we see the world and interact with our communities and in fact how it destroys our sense of community altogether; it’s about climate change and the crossover between economic and geographic inequality; it’s about online and streaming culture, the sort of desperate reaching for a cure to loneliness and the lack of privacy it creates, the dehumanizing nature of content and the feeling of entitlement people have to every single piece of a person they view as Content; it’s about our societal obsession with violence as entertainment, the commodification of women’s bodies, and the ways that we adultify certain children to inure ourselves to their suffering. Ava Reid has a lot to say about a lot of things and this standalone book packs a punch.

And as a dystopia, the best dystopian stories make you look in their pages and say “wow, that’s bleak,� and then look up at the world around you and think “oh…shit.�
Taking the things we can already see happening all around us and pushing them to extremes, Fable shows us a young woman who routinely travels through her town by rowing a boat up and down flooded streets and the literal geographic inequality it creates between those who can afford to live upstream of the flooding and those who can’t in a world ravaged by climate change; another who is groomed and hand-crafted to the level of perfection demanded by the ruling class, and yet whose biggest flaw remains that despite this she is still human; a corporation headed by the richest people in the world that is so all-consuming and all-controlling you’re not quite sure what counts as corporation and what counts as government; a society so transactional that it is seen as a kindness to ignore our neighbors in need of help, lest they become indebted to us.

There are a dozen and a half other things I’d love to touch on in what would amount to an essay at this point (Dystopia as satire! The etymology of character names! The long history of cyborgs as a vehicle for genderqueer storytelling, as explained to me by my friend while we read this book together and which she discusses in her review! The way women and girls are overlooked in their own stories for more palettable men! The double sided coin of hope!), but for now I will leave you with this:
I am not one to typically be so deeply affected by stories with a core theme of The Saving Power Of Love - or at least for that theme in particular to be what touches me - but something about the way Ava writes them hits me right in my soul every time and manages to speak to me in a way others don’t.

Ava Reid remains one of my favorite authors and someone I am so excited to continue to see publishing for a long time to come.