Proxy (Proxy, #1) By Alex London
Wow, this was bad.
DNF @ 63%. I put off writing a review for weeks in the hope that my anger would die down and I could give this more than 1 star and some rabid ranting. Well, one of those goals was accomplished -- I no longer have the burning need to write a scathing review. This book is simply not worth the effort.
So I'm limiting myself to one (1) rant:
The story alternated cleanly between two POVs until the two main characters met up in person, and then POV changes starting coming randomly in the middle of scenes. I switched from the audiobook to print at that point, thinking maybe the problem would be less obvious that way. But no. And then a 3rd character was added to the mix, so the POV randomly jumped around from sentence-to-sentence between those three people. Yes, multiple POV changes within a single paragraph. Repeatedly. It became impossible to follow the narrative or invest in a character's perspective. When a 4th character joined them, I could not even imagine what a shitpile the story would become with still more random head-hopping, so I bailed out in disgust. It was stupid of me to wait that long, and I regret the hours of my life wasted reading/listening to this amateur-hour production. 9780399257766 Wow, I didn't really know what to expect going into this. People recommended it to me when I asked for more LGBT+ reads after Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. And I can say I'm pleasantly surprised. I also read this for #diverseathon , and it ended up being perfect for that. Not only is the main character gay, but he's also a person of color.
Besides all that, I really enjoyed this novel on its own! Syd was super realistic in his thoughts about situations, I thought. He seemed real to me. I really liked learning about the system these characters lived in. The whole Patron and Proxy relationship was - not awesome- but interesting. I liked that there are real consequences for every decision in this book.
It's not perfect. I think there were a couple times when I was confused by the motivation of some characters, but I had a really fun time reading it regardless. I'll definitely be reading the second book in the duology and giving his other books a go. 9780399257766 Solid book. I really appreciated both the racial diversity and the LGBT elements present in this story! Excited to pick up the next one. 9780399257766 4.5 stars
Going along with my idea of book reproduction in my review of Speechless, Proxy would be the child of Uglies by Scott Westerfeld and Legend by Marie Lu. It blends fast-paced action with a well-fleshed futuristic world, complete with characters that are rife with wit and passion.
Knox has never felt consequences before. A Patron born into one of the City's richest families, he has access to the best technology, clothing, and parties. Every time he makes a mistake, his Proxy - Syd, a hard-worker living in the rough equivalent of a slum - gets beaten up or electrocuted. But when Knox takes a joy ride too far and kills someone, Syd is sentenced to death. The two unlikely companions join forces to fight the system that has trapped them for all of their lives.
Proxy has a plot you have to experience for yourself. The premise of an affluent city in which the poor and rich despise one another isn't striking on its own, but when blended with Alex London's extra layers - like how those who are rich find anything natural/organic disgusting - the entire book comes to life. London paces his story in a way that lets his world-building sink in while maintaining the book's overall thrilling nature.
The conflict and tension between the main characters kept me on my toes. Analyzing and eventually coming to understand Syd's tough life and his desire for freedom, as well as Knox's pampered upbringing and the unhealthy relationship with his father, was an all-consuming and all-too-enjoyable process. While the characters may have come off as cutout stereotypes at first their interactions with one another elevated them to a higher level.
I would recommend this one to any searching for a thrilling story with a fascinating setting and believable characters. It has so much potential for a sequel, especially because of how its themes encompass the idea of debt, death, honor, and hatred. I finished it in a day, and I do not doubt that many others will too.
*review cross-posted on my blog, the quiet voice. 9780399257766 Alex London’s Proxy creates a fascinating dystopian culture of debt and credit. Syd was an orphan so he owes a debt to society. When his debt is purchased he becomes a Proxy for Knox a wealthy Patron. If Syd needs anything, like school, food, shelter he can turn to his Patron. But that only means more debt. As a Proxy, Syd bears the punishment for anything Knox does. When Knox needs to be punished it’s Syd that gets shocked or forced to perform hard labor while his Patron has to watch.
When sixteen year old Knox steals a car to take a girl on a high speed joyride to the zoo and crashes, things start to go really bad for sixteen year old Syd. Not only does Syd need to get punished for stealing then destroying the car but the girl was killed in the crash. That means sixteen hardcore years in prison for Syd.
That is just the start of the thrill ride. It was really hard to put down once I started. It seems like each chapter provided one more twist, one more secret revealed, one more person that’s out to get Syd. Can Syd beat the system that society as built to hold him down, to keep him in debt? Proxy is well worth the read to find out.
I’ve seen the book compared to The Maze Runner. Personally I enjoyed this novel much more than The Maze Runner. Proxy creates a much more believable story. Highly recommended! 9780399257766
“Life is too short for perpetual misery.”
A diverse, dystopian, queer and action packed story, with lots of unexpected turns.
In the beginning I had difficulties understanding the world our main character lives in, especially the system and the technical terms. And while I, being the hopeless romantic that I am, could've wished for a little more romance, this novel had a good pace and great writing.
Find more of my books on Instagram 9780399257766 This is fantastic joy ride of a book, with cool future tech, nuanced male protagonists (one of whom happens to be gay), good action scenes, interesting discussions of personal responsibility, and terrific twists and turns.
This full text of this review appears in The Midnight Garden. An advance copy was provided by the publisher.
Recommended for: fans of False Memory or Legend. 9780399257766 Actual rating: 3.5
Poor Sydney Carton. He's got a hard Knox life. Yes, I wrote this entire review just so I could work hard Knox life into it somehow.
Remember reading The Whipping Boy in grade school? Remember how much you hated the fact that life could be so unfair? Well, get ready to be even more bitter towards life in this YA dystopian version of it.
This has a plot, but I think it doubles as a social commentary and satire about our culture and how it is devolving. It's about consumerism, debt, the unfairness of social classes. Born to a rich family? Awesome. Born into debt? Tough shit. Deal with it. Things are not going to get better, and in any case, it's your fault for being born poor anyway. Seriously, that's how things are in this future. Forget Albert Camus, forget George Orwell; I think I became more depressed reading this book and interpreting its bleak messages than I ever was reading Nineteen Eighty Four. I think the social overtures overshadow the characters, and that's actually a good thing because I found very little to actually like about the characters, which might actually be the message all along.
The future in this book is pretty damn bleak. We hear a lot about social disparity these days, how the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer. I don't know if there are only the two distinct social classes in this book's version of a dystopian future, but we only see things from two points of view, the very rich and the very poor, the Upper City and the Lower City. In the future, the world is controlled by debt, consumerism, targeted advertisements. It is a thinly veiled parody of what the author feels our world is coming to. Contracts, debts, if contracts couldn't be enforced, the system would collapse. Contractual agreements, they all learned from the first day of school, were all that stood between civilization and a return to the age of chaos. Trying to delete a debt was like trying to destroy the world.
Our behavior is tracked, every purchase goes into a personal database, poor kids have installations into their biofeed, a system installed within your blood, that sends them ads based on personal behavior and prior purchases. Think Amazon interest-based ads in hyperdrive. Advertising. All. The. Time. Your body is merely a network.
If you are born poor, or an abandoned orphan, tough shit. You are literally born with debt. The Benevolent Society charged ten years for a 'rescue' from the desert and another three for installing the datastream into your blood. Three more years got tacked on for foster care, and two more just to get into school. That made eighteen altogether. Syd knew that eighteen years of debt well. He had it himself. All Sydney ever wanted is to stay under the radar, work off his debt, and just be an anonymous drone among many. He didn't like mattering at all. He longed for the carefully constructed anonymity, the world of not mattering to anyone that he'd spent a lifetime building and seen crumble in only one day. Thanks to his Patron, he doesn't even get that much. Welcome to the future!
Sydney is a bit of a martyr; for a guy who's trying to just get by, he takes too much upon himself, and he's more soft-hearted and optimistic than he should have been given his status. I expected a savvy street rat, I got a kid with too much humanity, too much guilt, who blames himself for any misfortune that befalls the people he cares about. Still, I felt so bad for him, and he is such a sad character. Take the first time he was punished for Knox's misdeeds, at the grand old age of five.
She asked him some question he didn’t understand about credits and debt and that was the first time he heard the words 'proxy' and 'patron'; all he remembered clearly after that was the pain of the shocks she gave him, one, two, three, four, five, like his skin was being burned off from the inside and he cried and cried.
It took him about a year to stop crying when he was punished, and another year to understand that he wasn’t being punished for anything that he did. He came to believe he was being punished simply for being born.
If you are born wealthy, then you are a Patron, with a Proxy to take your punishment for you. The Proxy is a kid with debts to pay, in this case, Sydney Carton is Knox's Proxy. The theory is that the Patron must watch his Proxy being punished, and therefore learn to behave from seeing another's pain on his behalf. Surely, after over 10 years of seeing his poor Proxy suffer from being EMD shocked (similar to Tasered) and punished in various other ways would cure Knox's disobedience and make him into a better, more considerate human being.
Nope.
Knox is irredeemably unsympathetic. A spoiled, rich kid. A surprisingly brilliant hacker considering he doesn't do much studying besides close scrutiny of girls' anatomy. He does anything he wants, with the full knowledge that his proxy will take his punishments. The way he sees it, it's his prerogative to take advantage of all that's offered him. I think the author tries to make Knox into a somewhat more sympathetic character because he still mourns his mother's death. But no, not at all. All I see throughout the book, and Knox really does not change much, is a clichéd poor-little-rich-boy. His father ignores him for work, so he acts out. According to Knox, nothing is his fault. It was his luck in life to be born wealthy, and it is his privilege to enjoy it. It's Sydney's fault that he's got so much debt (never mind that Sydney got into debt just for being born), so he's got to put up with it, it's just the system, it's just the way things work. Knox has no sympathy for anyone, and honestly, I can't rummage up a bit of love or even like for him, when he tries and fails to feel a little bit of anything.
'He wanted to tell her yes, now he believed. He wanted to tell her he believed what she believed because maybe then she'd hold his hand, maybe then she’d smile back and remind him who he used to be. But he didn’t believe and he didn't say yes. He just couldn't fake it. Instead, he shrugged. 'I guess it doesn’t matter either way.'
There are other characters in the book who feel like a parody of today's first-world activist, a wealthy girl who takes on causes and believes overly in her own self-importance, a Causegirl. None are altogether likeable or memorable. The plot itself is secondary to the social criticism and moral tones, and got to be more than a little ridiculous and completely unbelievable at times. Read it for what it is, a social commentary, and not for the plot. 9780399257766 My review at geeksout.org:
Very rarely, I come across a book that manages to surprise me.
We are living in a post-Harry Potter-and-Twilight world, and young adult fiction has become synonymous with mediocre imitators of either series. Books for younger readers are lucrative right now, and publishers have swarmed to tales of wizard schools and supernatural romance like flies to a bloated, festering corpse. For every book that manages to find its wings and rise from the rotting carcass of these peripheral bookstore genre shelves (Suzanne Collins managed it with The Hunger Games) there are countless other squirming maggots hatched from the eggs of publishing greed that remain writhing around and devouring their own filth and the respectability of the genre itself. It was with these frustrations that I opened the first page of Proxy, Alex London's upcoming sci-fi for young readers novel.
From the first sentence, I knew that all of my assumptions and hesitations were going to be irrelevant, and what followed was one of the most exciting and surprisingly multi-layered works of YA fiction I have ever read.
And I do hate that genre distinction. There is nothing juvenile or childish about this work. The best YA fiction should only differ from grownup fiction in the age of the protagonist, and like the great Roald Dahl, Alex London treats both his readers and his characters with intelligence and respect.
Proxy takes place in a post-societal collapse technocracy (though I hesitate to draw comparisons, think Panem in The Hunger Games, but with sharper teeth). In Mountain City, the 1% live a life of sci-fi utopian marvels in the Upper City and the poor live down in the filth and stink of The Valve. It may sound familiar in concept, but is executed in a fresh way that avoids genre cliches -- the poor are not technically enslaved by the Upper City, but exist in a state of something like mental/spiritual slavery thanks to the debt system. The poor are kept poor by adding years of debt to any goods and services they require to the point where it becomes impossible to ever pay off, and are kept from organizing in any rebellion by the constant distraction of having to compete with each other for resources.
The most interesting and unique take on this familiar setting is the proxy system. When rich kids (patrons) in the Upper City break the law or do something punishable, they are forced to sit and watch the punishment (usually some form of electrical shock, though forced labor also comes into play) be taken out on their proxy. The proxies never see or meet their patrons. In one of the novel's best written and most memorable scenes, we watch as a patron experiences psychological suffering while watching his proxy's physical suffering during punishment. This book goes to some very dark places, and this is a scene that will stick with me for a long time.
It is through the proxy system that we are introduced to the two main characters of the book. Knox, a spoiled rich kid from the Upper City, and his proxy Syd, a poor orphan from below. Once again, if that sounds like an overly familiar character setup, think again. There is nothing one dimensional or obvious about these characters. As we follow Knox and Syd's journey (the details of which I'll avoid spoiling) we see them grow and change and develop in ways that make them feel very real and believable. These two (along with Marie, the third member of their group) are very flawed, but also very complex and smart. If there was ever a time you were reading Harry Potter and wanting to throw the book on the floor because Harry was so stupid and you just wanted to shake him and force him to listen to Hermione, you will be pleased with these characters. Syd and his friends are all intelligent and behave in ways that make sense. This is, at heart, a character-driven story about friendship and self discovery. Those things can be incredibly eyeroll-worthy in lesser hands, but London does a fantastic job at creating some of the most fully realized and believable young people I've experienced and makes the entire thing work. I found myself continuously impressed with each character without it seeming like they were unrealistically perfect. They're not sainted and idealized versions of youth: they lie, they steal, and they kill. This is what makes the book so great. There is a sense of grittiness and honesty about the brutal world of adolescence here that I really appreciated. One of the big pitfalls of writing books with younger protagonists is that they can often come across as incredibly wooden, overly precocious, and unbelievable. Even the greats sometimes make this mistake (sorry Stephen King, I love you, but....)
Some sense of world building is sacrificed for the sake of jumping straight into the action of the story, but this actually works to the book's advantage. We get no Tolkien-style break in momentum to describe the workings and details of the world they inhabit, but rather learn these details gradually through the perspectives of Syd in The Valve and Knox in the Upper City. The Hobbit fan in me sometimes craved more details about the city, but I think in this particular case, the fact that we are only given partial information through each character is effective considering that these are still children and they themselves have only a partial and limited understanding of the world around them.
Syd would be a welcome addition to the YA main character pantheon on these merits alone, but there is one other thing that sets him apart from the rest of the stock orphan protagonists in young fiction. Syd is gay. I knew this going in, and was both intrigued and worried about the way it would be handled -- so much of fiction with a gay main character ends up being limited by the I was showering in the locker room with the captain of the football team who always beat me up but today I caught him looking at me type of plot, and I was concerned that Syd's sexuality would either distract from the plot or be treated offensively and clumsily. London pulls this off impressively -- Syd's sexuality, as well as his skin color (darker than his friends and most of white-washed genre storytelling) is at the core of his character but doesn't define who he is or become ALL that he is (you know, like the way people actually are in real life!)
Syd's struggles with sexuality are not the focus here -- he is outed fairly early on in the book and seems more annoyed by it than anything else -- but it does give an added dimension and unexpected layer of nuance to the way he experiences the world. One that is an extremely welcome and long overdue addition to this kind of story. In one of the most heart breaking and uncomfortably true to life moments in the book, we discover that before he really understood how the patron/proxy system worked, he blamed himself and his sexuality for the reasons that he was chosen for beatings and punishment. Syd's journey of coming to terms with this in the dystopian future should strike a nerve with most LGBT readers who dealt with similar feelings growing up in the real world.
This is not light reading, but it's not entirely doom and gloom -- there are plenty of fun and touching moments between the three friends that struck me as being some of the few scenes in YA fiction where the humor seemed genuine and not forced. You can actually imagine these three hanging out and spending time together for reasons other than the fact that the author made them do it. The way they joke around and tease each other sounds real, and even the gay jokes are great. Some of the best moments come from Knox, who is as infuriatingly endearing to the reader as he is to those around him. When he flirts with Syd, you want Syd to punch him in the face, but you also understand why he doesn't, and I caught myself smiling at these scenes. In a world where all three of these people were constantly plugged into a larger network that continuously streamed data and advertisements directly into their brains, it was exciting to watch them learn and grow and discover things about themselves and each other as they go off the grid in the latter half of the novel.
The book keeps up a brisk and steady pace right through to the last page, with an ending that was powerful and emotional without being forced or sententious. Yes, I cried.
My major frustration with the novel is that I wanted more of it. It is one of the few times that I'm actually upset that the publishers showed restraint and didn't force the author to split this into a trilogy or series, because I was wanting to spend a lot more time with these characters. I do hope we see Syd again in the future in some other form, though I like that this is a complete and self-contained story.
At one point Syd, in a moment of frustration, thinks that he wants his friends to be traveling together as people, not as ideas, and that sums up everything that is right about this book. For a story to juggle so many layers of symbolism and allusions without seeming like awkward and heavy handed allegory takes immense skill on the author's part, and the fact that London manages to do that here while still creating some of the most believable and nuanced young characters I've ever met in fiction is a true accomplishment. I wish this book had been around when I was a kid. I'm proud to display Proxy on my shelf alongside the classics in this beloved genre, because its position there is entirely deserved. Rating: A
Ranerdin@gmail.com 9780399257766 This was a disappointment. The basic idea for the book was decent, but the execution was lacking—to put it mildly.
There are various technical issues, like the unnecessary POV shifts, the paper-thin characterisation, the shallow, dull storyline, or the obvious lack of proper content editing—to just name a few.
The story peaks at around 30% and then it unceremoniously deflates. The author thought he was writing an adventure, but all he accomplished was to make the story drag and wander aimlessly.
Also, it was as if he thought it would be cool to write a story by mashing up elements from films like The Matrix, or The Fifth Element, or even Waterworld. And while he was as it, he decided it'd be cooler to make his hero gay. I initially thought Syd's sexuality was simply not central to the plot—there was a clumsy and see-through attempt to make it seem like something would happen between him and his patron, Knox, early on—but this detail ends up adding nothing to the story or to Syd's development as a character.
The ending makes it clear there will be a sequel, but I for one won't be reading it.
9780399257766
Knox was born into one of the City’s wealthiest families. A Patron, he has everything a boy could possibly want—the latest tech, the coolest clothes, and a Proxy to take all his punishments. When Knox breaks a vase, Syd is beaten. When Knox plays a practical joke, Syd is forced to haul rocks. And when Knox crashes a car, killing one of his friends, Syd is branded and sentenced to death.
Syd is a Proxy. His life is not his own.
Then again, neither is Knox’s. Knox and Syd have more in common than either would guess. So when Knox and Syd realize that the only way to beat the system is to save each other, they flee. Yet Knox’s father is no ordinary Patron, and Syd is no ordinary Proxy. The ensuing cross-country chase will uncover a secret society of rebels, test both boys’ resolve, and shine a blinding light onto a world of those who owe and those who pay. Some debts, it turns out, cannot be repaid. Proxy (Proxy, #1)