Kinda wild that the second chapter of this book has the same name as the second chapter of the Holy Bible. I hope God is flattered. This chapter contains depictions of SELF-HARM, so if that’s a troubling topic to you, proceed with your own best interests in mind.
But anyway, onto chapter two.
Oh, the smell! The dreadful smell! Poor Tookie, covered in the wretched decay of other people’s refuse.
How I wish I could hand her a pair of loofah mitts or offer her a scalding bath with the essential oils of eucalyptus, bergamot, and ylang-ylang with three boxes of baking soda, a gallon of laundry detergent, twelve capfuls of all-purpose bleach, two squirts of antibacterial hand soap, and a dash of ammonia.
Okay, narrator, let’s just calm down. She reached into a trashcan to pull something out. She didn’t bathe in the Bog of Eternal Stench. (Ed. The beginning of this book and the beginning of Blood of Hercules, the current Jealous Patrons Book Club selection over at Patreon, share a certain over-the-top misery element.)
Unfortunately, due to the whole SMIZE thing, the school shuts off the water and tells everyone, hey, if you have to use the bathroom, you need to wait until you get home. We learn this after Tookie has gone to her “Autology” class, where students learn about different kinds of factory work and determine what type of factory work will be best for them. That detail is dropped in before the SMIZE/bathroom announcement, and I thought it was really cool. It built the world without smacking us over the head; we now know that Tookie is destined to be a nameless cog in an industrial machine.
We also learn that Tookie doesn’t have a locker. She’s so forgettable and overlooked that nobody assigned her one at the beginning of the year, and they were all taken. So, what has Tookie done? Created her own locker out of the former factory dumbwaiter, complete with a mini fridge full of snacks.
She pretty much liked all food except chocolate—she’d once gorged at a chocolate festival her mother had dragged her to in the district of LaDorno, home of some of the finest chocolatiers in the world. She’d eaten so much she’d gotten sick on the drive home, but her mother hadn’t shown her any sympathy when Tookie had demanded they pull over so she could throw up. So she had thrown up in the car. For punishment her mother had grounded her. LIterally. Tookie had been forced to sit and sleep on the floor of one month solid.
This kind of detail, the unfeeling, cruel parent figure, coupled with the secret refrigerator full of cookies, biscuits, gravy, and various barbecue sauces, would have made this book an instant classic if it had been a middle grade. For some reason, kids want to read about other kids living in bleak, abusive situations and coming out on top. Roald Dahl set the formula, I think, and it continued as a trope in works like Harry Potter and A Series of Unfortunate Events. There’s just something that appeals to young readers about the misfortune of others.
I don’t see it working as well in YA, where readers want to aspire to the level of the suffering and reward of the main characters rather than engage with it as a spectator.
[Ed. Interestingly, that dynamic does seem to appeal to adult readers of Bully Romance.]
The school day is over, and everyone is talking about T-DOD.
Kylie, a bronze-skinned girl wearing bamboo earrings the size of her head, read aloud from the Peppertown Press. “‘The Mayor of Metopia, the Honorable Devin Rump the Sixth, predicts the biggest turnout ever. spectators who have traveled to Metopia from all over the world are paying record prices for prime spots. […]'”
There is no way Devin Rump isn’t a reference to Donald Trump, further proving that people fucking hated his ass way before he ran for POTUS. Two, I find the concept of Metopia confusing, and here’s why:
Metopia was split into four quadrants, each with its own weather system—there was frigid Shivera, tempestuous Pitter-Patter, lovely LaDorno (only the elite lived there, and it was where T-DOD was always held), and finally, sweltering Peppertown, as hot as—you guessed it—a Scotch bonnet. That was where Tookie lived and where B3 stood.
The overuse of em-dashes suggests Sarah J. Maas may have ghostwritten Modelland.
No, I’m sorry. Modelland is far better already than A Court of Thorns and Roses.
But here’s where I’m a little shaky on the geography of Metopia. Each of these quadrants directly borders each other, and stepping across the border instantly moves you into their climate. And because of this, the town has a ton of different resources:
The city grew into the global center of the fashion and beauty industry. The majority of Metopia’s residents worked on inhumane fashion- or beauty- factory assembly lines—in fact, the majority of B3 students who weren’t selected for the grand Land on the mountain would end up doing the same.
So… is the entire world as fashion obsessed as Metopia? I had envisioned Metopia as being a country. Finding out a mayor rules them definitely threw me. I mean, Peppertown sounds like it’s a town on its own, right? I can’t be the only one thrown by this. Weirder, it sounds like these four quadrants came by their climates naturally. I’m gonna need some more explanation on how the fuck that happened before I can just accept it.
Especially since there’s a “Scotch bonnet” reference. If Scotland exists, are we on Earth? What’s happening here?
Because of the oppressive climate in Peppertown, Tookie’s hair immediately frizzes out the moment she steps outside:
Groaning, Tookie reached into her bag, groping for a bottle of CheveuxMal gel, the only gel that kind of worked on her hair.
Man, that’s a mean name for a hair gel. What’s dandruff shampoo called? SheddingBastard? (Ed. I suppose I should have indicated what the name means: it’s French for “Bad Hair”.)
Just how hot is it in Peppertown? There are no birds or insects. That’s how hot it is.
A fair-skinned, eggplant-shaped woman stepped out of a toe-ring factory. Before she could clap a sun hat on her head, her skin had turned an angry red.
Like, are we sure it’s the heat and there’s not an exposed nuclear core around here somewhere? Things are getting too spicy for the pepper. (Ed. I’m so sad that nobody got this American Dad! reference the first time around.)
A guy is fanning himself with a newspaper:
The headline on the front page said Baroness Still on the Run. It was a story that had ravaged Metopia for several years no: apparently, a famous, wealthy baroness had run a Yonzi scheme of sorts, investing people’s money unwisely and bankrupting them all. Instead of making good on her payments, she had gathered her family and fled.
I assume the scheme is named for Garles Yonzi. I hope we’ll see something of the baroness’s story in this book. This was the first book of an intended but unrealized series. I’ll be so disappointed if we never actually meet the scamming baroness. (Ed. We never meet the scamming baroness, and therefore a sequel is direly necessary.)
A couple of girls are watching water come out of a fire hydrant:
“Two SMIZEs have been found already,’ Dominique squealed. “Only two! Which leaves five still out there somewhere. If the SMIZE comes out now, we’ll cut it in half and we can both wear it to T-DOD!”
Monique squealed happily. “Our chances will improve by forty-five-point-five percent! Not bad!”
I have to admit, the SMIZE thing still confounds me. Not just what they’re made out of or what they are, but the way they work like golden tickets. Finding one doesn’t mean you’ll get selected, but it increases your chance by a certain percentage, which is weird to begin with, considering that people find them randomly. I’ll use myself as an example here because I know what I look like and I am comfortable with owning it. If the point of T-DOD is that some people will be chosen to go to the Land, where the most beautiful people are, why do my chances of being picked increase if I have a SMIZE? Let’s say I, Jenny Trout, find a SMIZE, and Margot Robbie does not find a SMIZE. Somehow, this means that I, Jenny Trout, am 90% more likely to be considered more beautiful than Margot Robbie? That’s not adding up, friends.
I feel like too much is going on with the SMIZE thing. Either make it totally random or make it based on physicality.
On her walk home, Tookie strays into some exposition:
Faded stamps read WHERE IS Ci~L? Newer ones painted on top of that said WHERE THE HELL IS Ci~L?
The messages puzzled Tookie. They referred to Ci~L—whose name was pronounced “see-el”—the most magnificent 7Seven ever to grace the earth, a Triple7, a majestic woman with caramel-colored skin and the most intoxicating eyes.
Why don’t they call Triple7s twenty-ones? [Ed. I stand by this. They should be called TwentyOnes or Twenty1s or 20Ones or whatever.]
Anyway, this model with the exhausting-to-type name was the face of basically everything until she announced that she was suddenly retiring and disappeared. Again, I hope this is covered in this book and isn’t just hinted at for a sequel. [Ed. It’s literally the plot of the book. It might seem weird that I wouldn’t come to that conclusion right away, but these first few chapters made it seem like the plot would be something else entirely.]
An interesting thing happens when Tookie walks past the factories:
Several children stood on the sidewalk, their eyes hollow, their hair cut short, their bodies swimming in workers’ uniforms. These were the Factory Dependents, children sometimes even younger than Tookie whose parents could no longer, or chose not to, care for them. Greedy industry overlords took them in, housed them in slums, and paid them nothing—servants for life.
I’m pretty sure “servants for life” are just like… enslaved people? But we all must admit how fucking cool it is to see child labor in the fashion industry depicted as nightmarishly dystopian in a book with a supermodel’s name on the cover. [Ed. While ANTM belongs in the conversation about ’00s beauty standards and expectations of women, Modelland takes some incredible swings at the fashion industry. Banks had enough industry power that she could safely make these statements without getting blacklisted. The emphasis on the destructive nature of fast fashion is leagues ahead of its time.]
Tookie’s friend Lizzie, who Tookie hasn’t seen in weeks, lives in a tree house all by herself. Yes, we have already heard that birds and insects can’t survive outside because of the heat, but apparently, trees and feral children can.
Tookie has been checking the treehouse every day in the hopes that Lizzie will be there, and today, Lizzie is back.
When they reached the top, the girls extended their palms out, pointed to the sky with both hands, sniffed each armpit, and then curtsied. this was their silent expression of their secret greeting, What’s up, Hot Queen?
I’m going to start doing this when I meet strangers, just to see if they’ve read the book.
Lizzie is perpetually afraid that she’s being pursued somehow. And:
Lizzie’s skin was oddly smooth, nothing like its normal acne-prone, pockmarked, sunburned state, and she wore a blue hospital gown tied at the back and a pair of doctor’s scrub pants that bagged at the ankles. SHIVERA COUNTY HOSPITAL was stitched on the gown. This always happened when Lizzie returned after a long period away.
I wish the prologue hadn’t ruined the reveal for us. We already know that sometimes, people get chosen on T-DOD and used for human experimentation, so there’s no mystery here: Lizzie is clearly one of those people. We wouldn’t have known that if the scenario hadn’t been laid out in the prologue. From Lizzie’s constant paranoia and the fact that she lives in a tree all by herself, we would have assumed that her hospitalizations were of the mental health variety. Now, when we discover that the powers that be scoop up homeless people and experiment on them, we’ll have seen it coming. It won’t be an impactful reveal or an impressive twist.
[Ed. At this point in the book, all signs seemed to be pointing to Tookie somehow finding a way into Modelland to rescue her friend from these horrible experiments. I’m hoping that’s what the sequel will be about.]
Tookie tells Lizzie about what happened at school with Theophilus and Zarpessa, and then Lizzie needs to go dumpster-diving for food, so like… I feel like Tookie might need a little perspective here.
A group of shabby people stood around the Dumpster.
Why is that capitalized? It’s not a mistake. “Dumpster” is consistently capitalized.
Some of them wore masks: the tallest man wore a gas mask, a shorter woman a tribal mask, and what looked like a girl Tookie’s age had on a tattered comedy-tragedy mask. The girl carried a familiar yellow Dream Bag in the crook of her elbow. Tookie frowned.
That’s right. The Yellow Dream bag belonged to Zarpessa in the first chapter. Zarpessa dumpster-dives for food, despite keeping up an appearance of being rich at school. Lizzie knew about it because she’s fought with Zarpessa over clothes found in the trash.
Suddenly, midsentence, Lizzie’s expression changed, clouding and contorting into a look Tookie knew all too well. Something else had overtaken Lizzie’s mind. Her body twitched. The muscles in her face stretched and contracted. She glared blankly into Tookie’s eyes.
“Tell them to stop,” Lizzie pleaded in a strange, garbled voice. “They always say it won’t hurt, but it does.”
Again, this doesn’t come off as mysterious or engaging. The reader goes, oh yeah, in the prologue, it said people got experimented on. Huh. Guess that’s what’s happening to Lizzie.
Wasted potential.
Lizzie ignored Tookie and continued her search, finally locating a sharp rock. She picked it up and then brought its jagged edge down to her inner arm, near her wrist. Blood flowed from the fresh slice in her skin. Tookie grabbed her arm. “Stop it! Why do you do that?”
LIzzie lowered her eyes. Her face was a ballet of twitching and wincing. “Because it hurts so much and I feel better when I do it,’ she said desperately.
This whole thing would have just been so much more sinister with some mystery behind it. And the self-harm could have been a red herring for mental illness and her hospitalization.
It’s even written as if it’s supposed to have been that way, with Tookie asking if the hospital has anything to do with Lizzie’s behavior.
The Melancholia Ward, she thought. That had to be where Lizzie had gone—that was surely where she always went. Officials probably hunted down the paranoid orphan girl and dragged her off to the infamous mental ward in Shivera County Hospital, since she was too unstable to work in a factory.
So, what came first? This plot line, or the prologue that pretty much sapped it of any tension or mystery? [Ed. In hindsight, it reads like editorial tinkering.]
Lizzie and Tookie have been daydreaming about leaving Peppertown for a long time, but Tookie isn’t ready, because she knows that for all their dreaming, they’re going to end up in a tree somewhere else, eating trash. And I mean, come on. If it’s good enough for raccoons, I don’t see why people should turn up their noses at it.
Lizzie insists that someone is “getting close” and has to run off, and she can’t tell Tookie who “they” are or what they’re doing, or else Tookie will be in danger, too. The last Tookie sees of Lizzie in the chapter is watching the girl look for another sharp rock to cut herself with.
