Hi everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I’m reviewing The Fifth: Indoctrinated City by Chris Sykes. For this review, I received an ARC by the author in exchange for an honest review. This book was published April 16th, 2021. This review has minor spoilers.
The Fifth: Indoctrinated City is a YA dystopian novel about how hatred on the top levels of Britain’s fascist government affects the lives of the country’s citizens. New laws are implemented, and certain people in the country are now illegal. Thus, they are hunted by the Patrol. Victor, an Iranian man living in York with his wife Evie, a member of Parliament, and children, is now one of the government’s new targets and he is forced to leave his family to save his own life. Years later, Evie has lost her seat in Parliament and is now on the run as well. Brian, her new husband, takes the children, Jack, Jenny, and Zo, to York’s train station trying to outrun the government’s Patrol. But Brian dies, and Jenny and Zo are separated from their brother Jack. He is rescued by their mother Evie and is taken to a Scottish castle to join the British Liberation Army (BLA). Jenny and Zo, for their part, reunite with their long-last father, Victor, and become members of The Fifth. From there, the book alternates between Jenny’s and Jack’s point of view, and we see how both Jack and Jenny struggle to fit in and find a place in their new reality.
I was pleased to know that the author is an advocate for mental health awareness, and he sets out to raise his voice about such an important topic here with Jack’s storyline. I admit though that dystopian novels are a new thing for me, and I was not entirely sure what I was going to encounter here. I was a little worried about how the dystopian political world in this book and the topic of mental health were going to fit in the story. Truthfully, considering that today we are living in a world out of the norm with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, I don’t think that the dystopian aspect of this novel is entirely off mark here and that was interesting. COVID-19 has affected the mental health of millions of people, and I was intrigued that this book specifically addressed the mental health of young people. Jack’s personal struggle takes him to some really dark places, and I liked that the author didn’t shy away from describing his thoughts and feelings while he was going through this.
“All mankind throughout history has been plagued by this desire for more,” said William. And then, as if quoting a poem, “Perfection, although oft sought, is rarely found, cannot be bought. It is the damnation of man, cursed and adored, its treasure is oft of miniscule reward.”
I need to confess though that I was much more invested in Jack’s story than Jenny’s. I don’t mean to say that her journey was any less hard though. I just couldn’t connect with her for some reason, and I found that some of the things she did were quite implausible and hard to believe; maybe that’s why I couldn’t connect with her, I don’t know. Also, I would have liked the adults in this novel to have been more involved. I know that this is a YA novel, and that Jack and Jenny’s stories are at the forefront of the novel, but I felt that the adults (e.g., Evie and Victor, the members of the Fifth Uprising, General Cartwright) weren’t as present as they could have been to help us understand better what is going on in the (political) background. Moreover, I gathered that Jack and Jenny’s parents weren’t exactly friendly with one another, and I would have liked to see how this translates into their personal journey a little bit more. I mean, it’s there but I think it wasn’t explored as much as it could have been. Again, I understand that this is a YA novel and by its very nature going further into topics like this one would require more depth than YA novels are usually known for, but I think that this could have given us something else to connect with Jack and Jenny.
Finally, the dystopian world this novel takes place isn’t as developed as I would have liked. And by this I mean that there wasn’t enough world building in some parts of the novel to help me understand more clearly what was going on. I kept expecting to be told here and there how the government was running things; how it all came to be. But I never got to see how the British government on the one side and the Fifth on the other worked very clearly. It is true that we spend most of the novel underground with the Fifth, but the book focuses primarily on how Jack and Jenny struggle to adapt to their new life as rejects of British society and I think that the novel would have benefited immensely if an explanation of how the fascist regime in Britain came to be and how it started persecuting its citizens had been included.
I gave this book 3.5 stars.
Disclaimer: The picture in this post is not mine. It is used here with the permission of the author.
