Flawed by Cecelia Ahern

Flawed by Cecelia Ahern

First book in the Flawed series by Cecelia Ahern

 

(taken from Amazon.com)

If you break the rules, you will be punished.

Celestine North lives a perfect life.

She’s a model daughter and sister and she’s well-liked by her classmates and teachers. She’s also a girl of logic. To Celestine, every problem has a solution. Every action is either right, or wrong.

Celestine has always known about the Flawed, second-class citizens who are branded as punishment for their crimes. And she always thought they must deserve their punishment.

But everything changes when Celestine witnesses the mistreatment of a Flawed man, and steps up to help him. But in helping him, she reveals that she is imperfect. And in Celestine's society, imperfection is punished.

She is imprisoned. She is branded. She is flawed.

This book is an odd mix of a futuristic society with all the technological and cultural context of today. It's a little weird at first, because it's almost more like a modern-day alternate reality of Britain (and yes, you can relatively geo-locate the setting of the book, from a few select clues about other parts of Europe, and a reference to ruins of a Norman tower in the sequel). The characters not only talk the way Brits do in modern-day, but their technology is identical, and the descriptions of their hairstyles and clothes are the same as what people wear today. So the book, although seemingly foreign in how it shapes and governs society, has pieces of it that make the characters more accessible. I'm not sure if that's a lack of imagination on the part of the author, or if it's an intentional point-of-entry for the reader.

Regardless, you can definitely see references and undertones in what happens in the book to Rosa Parks (the whole incident on the bus thing is quite obvious) and to The Scarlet Letter (again, obvious. Just look at the cover). It's an interesting way to bring together two different civil rights struggles from the past together into a modern-day context. So we see people in the book branded not for their adultery, and not arrested for violating their segregated seating, but for ethical issues like euthanasia and business practices. I certainly don't agree with some of the choices of "the Guild" in the book, but there are many issues that are considered "wrong" or "using poor judgment" that I agreed with, and the author does that on purpose, I think. She is intentionally pressing the reader to think about how to make a justice system that works--one that calls forward wrong-doing and endorses morality, but at the same time which treats all people as human beings. The striking problem that you see, whether the author intended to reveal it or not, is that a definition of right and wrong, of good and evil, a foundation on which a justice system must stand, is undefined by society--both the society of Flawed, and our own.

Overall Rating: 7 / 10 Stars 

Despite my blatant prejudice against dystopian and sci-fi-type books, this one's plot held my attention well, and the themes were complex enough to keep me intrigued about where its social commentary was going. Overall, seven stars (and mind you, I don't think I'd ever exceed eight with this genre). Also, it ends on a rather abrupt cliff-hanger, so you'll have to your hands on the sequel to get any kind of closure.