Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I'll be frank: I've never been happier to finish a book. Ever. And not for good reasons, too. I really, really, really tried to like The Selection, but it was seriously a chore trying to finish reading it. I started reading it on the flight to Cancun and didn't finish it until I forced myself to sit down and slog through it a few days after I got back. That said, let's make this quick, otherwise I'm going to be distracted by old episodes of The Sing-Off again. What did I like? The Premise. I feel like The Selection had the potential to be amazing. The premise itself is unique - thirty five young women vying for the attention and love of the future King in a country that's constantly threatened by extremely violent rebel attacks. I've never read anything like that before, and I think it could have been a compelling base. But in the end, The Selection absolutely failed to deliver and it ended up boring, tedious, and border-line annoying. The Cover. I have to admit: The Selection probably wins the Prettiest Cover category in this year's YA offerings. Okay, now that we've established what I liked...what did I dislike about the novel? America Singer. It was very difficult to relate or empathize with the main character. Her narrative voice was grating and her meekness, indecisiveness, and cluelessness drove me bonkers (and were really the primary culprits for why it took me so farking long to finish the book). I think the only time America gave me a glimmer of hope that maybe, just maybe, she's more than just a cardboard character was in the last twenty to thirty pages of the book. I'm glad I at least had that small glimpse, but slogging through two hundred or so pages just to find a small passage where she didn't make me want to bang my head against the wall is not exactly something I would consider as a success. World-building. I know the author mentioned somewhere that The Selection was really more of a "diet dystopia" - and I get that - a lot of YA dystopians can be categorized the same way. I wasn't expecting pages and pages and pages of exposition on how America's world came to be, but I expected them to at least make sense. There's just way too many glaring plot holes, and the ex-Political Science major in me died a little inside when I read about how the old United States was essentially destroyed. Love Interests. Team Maxon? Team Aspen? Personally, I'm on Team Neither. I thought Maxon was offensive, self-absorbed and just a little bit creepy, and Aspen was a chauvinistic douchebag. That's really all I have to say about them. There are other major problems with the The Selection - the blatant sexism, most notably - but that would necessitate a lot more (increasingly venomous) words and I'm trying to pare down the length of my reviews (because holy crap, my last two reviews have been over a thousand words long). I wish the author went in a different direction with The Selection. It could have been a light, funny read or a darker, grittier view of a dystopian society. Instead, it was just...blah. In a nutshell: I'm sure others have and will enjoy The Selection, but it's just not for me.