Compete

After finishing the first book I was really excited for the second book, and it was not a let down! I definitely recommend to any lovers of teenage fiction.😊

I love the series thus far and can’t wait for the movie/tv show. The flow and rhythm of the book makes it impossible to put down. Thank you for sharing your talents!

I remember reading through this series as it was being written, way back to the WattPad days, and really enjoying it! I am very much into dystopian/apocalyptic genre books and enjoyed the general premise of this series. Now that the main Atlantic Grail series is completed, I wanted to read through it again starting from the beginning.

Now that I’m older I’m realizing a lot of things that bother me or just make me straight up uncomfortable.

One of my biggest qualms is how little Gwen seems to be bother by the amount of death that surrounds her in the books. In the first book, she reflects on the death of her fellow peers in the Finals very briefly, only addressed once more after the fact in a nightmare and then ever mentioned again. The same thing happens in this book (I don’t want to give away too many spoilers) but when something violent and deadly happens around Gwen she is perturbed in the moment and then after the clean up is done she never mentions it again??? There’s not enough lingering trauma for her or any of the characters which is so WEIRD, especially because these are literal children that were talking about. Meanwhile, I’m books like The Hunger Games, the characters that have died in the presence of Katniss Everdeen are honored and brought up throughout the entire series. And I would say that TAG is more graphic/deadly than THG so I’m so confused how the author can spend pages explaining the science and complexities of the technology in the book but doesn’t even discuss all of the trauma that these 12 - 19 year olds have witnessed over the course of like 2 years.

Another big qualm I have with this book is how a lot of the people of color are described by the author. You can tell the author is trying to introduce and maintain a very diverse cast of characters but the way she describes them physically and writes their dialogue is so hurtful. I’m a black female and I HATE seeing Laronda be perpetuated as the “sassy black best friend/side kick”. I hate that Dawn is the “super stoic and political Indigenous girl”. I hate that the people of Atlantis are supposed to based on Egyptian culture but a lot of the important figureheads that represent them are white??

I also feel like the characters that get described intricately for their beauty, grace, etc. are never the characters of color. It’s like “oh, I was standing in a room with a black girl as well as a beautifully toned, golden-locked, effortlessly confident Atlantean with a face so striking in beauty that all of the other teens with me couldn’t help but stare and drool”. And it’s like…oh, okay. Also, why is “large and bulky” the only two words that seem to be used to describe Chiyoko anytime she happens to be in the room.

The author is very eloquent in her writing and it is very obvious she has done a lot of research to move forward an amazing world and storyline that she has created. But it’s evident that she never thought to research something as simple as what it would look like for someone with relaxed hair to endure this kind of journey. Black women with relaxers need it touched up every 3 months or so to maintain the “straightness” and even then, it needs to be blow dried and straightened for it to actually be straight, otherwise it’s still very kinky in texture. So how is it that after months of training and a year of traveling in space Laronda still has a “short and straight/relaxed bob”? It’s just weird for the author to have done SO much research in one department and yet so little in other things that a very simple, like hair.

Even though I adored this series as a young girl, now that I’m an adult I just see way too many problematic things that make it difficult for somebody that isn’t white to be immersed in, despite the author trying to be inclusive.