Book Review: The Pledge by Kimberly Derting

The society that The Pledge is set in is based on a caste system and ruled by a monarchy with a female head that is strickly against male rule even if it means servering the family line. The classes of people are based on the language you speak, the unnamed lower class that is not allowed to speak at all, the Serving class that can only speak Englaise, Vendor class that speaks Parshon and Englaise and the Council class that speaks Termani and Englaise. One cannot even look at someone speaking a language different from their own without the threat of death which makes things very different for our heroine, Charlaina, who can understand all languages even those she has not heard spoken before.

War has broken out over their country and the queen, Sabara, seems very close to death and only holding on until she finds her replacement, the one of the Old Throne, which makes life in the Capitol city very difficult for it inhabitants, though, it really does not seem like that much of a burden. They never really give the pretense of the war occuring, only giving name of the opposing ruler and the parts of the country already taken over, so, I really do not see why they bothered to mention it when it did not actually hold a role until the middle when the raids started to occur. But, we never saw any enemy soldiers or even see Queen Elena. If they would have just called them the rebels and spoke nothing of another queen it would have made more sense to me.

Queen Sabara is supposed to ba this insidous, omnipotent ruler but I never felt that from her because she is present as a frail old woman that simply wants to continue her reign. Since, they basically give it away in the first chapter of the book I am going to go ahead and give away the big "surprise": the queen does not truly die. She simply transfers her concious or how she cutely puts it her Essence into someone elses body, makes them queen and then continues on where she left off the last time which seems cartoonish to me. Seriously, simply the idea of that seems like something a Disney villian would think up while twirling their beard or whatever it is they do to help themselves think.

Charliana, or Charlie as she likes to be called, seems a little dull to me and her narrative is slow and borderline uninteresting at points. Sure, she has some interesting traits such as her gift of language and such but really beyond that there was really nothing that drew me to her because she was not particularly strong. Also, she seemed rather dense concerning her best friend, Brooklyn, because she was shocked when a few revelations were revealed about Brooklyn when they did not seem that odd concidering the personality shown to us. Her want to protect her family and friends at any cost is admirable but really it is a cliche trait. Now, if she was all about throwing them to the dogs to save her skin I might be a little more interested because you do not see the ruthless, apathetic heroine enough and a dystopian novel is the perfect time to use a character like that.

Though, I found things to dislike about the novel it was not a complete loss because the basic plot and society created were not terrible just poorly executed in my opinion. If you do not mind a borrage of uninteresting characters and an unsatifying antagonist then go ahead and read it, you might be more entertained than I was. I would probably go with reading this offers other series, The Body Finder, instead of The Pledge.