The Most Confusing Game

Caraval by Stephanie Garber

Pages: 403 Genre: YA fantasy

Rating: 1 Star

Book Club Pick

Scarlett Dragna and her sister, Donatella, have never left the island where they live with their cruel father. Scarlett dreams of attending Caraval, a yearly event where people get to play in a big elaborate game. Now, she's engaged to a Count, and had given up hope of going to Caraval when the games master, Legend, sends her a note and tickets for her, her sister, and her fiancé. Tella, with the help of a mysterious sailor, ensure that Scarlett gets to Caraval. Once she arrives, though, Tella is immediately kidnapped, and the only way Scarlett can ensure she'll see her sister again is to play and win the game. In a game where she is told that nothing is real, Scarlett has to fight to reach the end.

This book was a terrible reading experience. Everything about it was annoying, confusing, and so bewildering that I couldn't even find my footing enough to pretend to care.

The worldbuilding made no sense. There's no sense of the landscape of the world, much less the politics of individual places. The sisters' home island has no real relation to any other place, but even in an isolated sense it's entirely senseless. Scarlett and Tella's father is a Governor, and he's described as powerful, but other than being able to successfully marry Scarlett off to a Count, there's nothing to indicate what kind of power he has. Slight spoiler alert (but not really), their father is horrifically and outright abusive. Is he so powerful that other people are afraid of him? Or do they look the other way because of his political status? I wish we could've been a little bit grounded in these details, because they do impact Scarlett throughout the story.

Scarlett was a really unengaging main character. She took naive to its extreme: despite being told repeatedly that people would be lying to her and that there were be many fake things happening as part of the gameplay, Scarlett believed everything that ever happened to her and refused to think beyond surface level about anything she confronted. She would constantly do exactly what was asked of her, then she'd act shocked and bewildered when they were lying to her. Meanwhile, her driving motivation is supposedly saving her sister, but none of her actions really support that. It's a lot of telling instead of showing; she spends most of her time either whining about being betrayed or obsessing over Julian (who does nothing to earn it). And worst of all is that she did not develop at all. She started the book the same way she ended it, except now she's telling me that she's more courageous. I guess. It's hard to root for a character who is seemingly intentionally making things as bad for herself as she can.

Julian is the mysterious sailor, and while you can argue it's a spoiler to say he's a love interest, you'll figure it out quickly because the only thing Scarlett can talk about when he's around (which is most scenes) is how hot he is — in a way that, arguably, seemed a little bit more adult than YA (maybe New Adult? Actually, how old are they anyway?). We get it! She's sexually attracted to him! Is there anything else we should know about him, especially before we fall in love? I guess not, because we truly learn nothing about him throughout the four days they're playing this game together. At some point in the book, Scarlett actively makes fun of the idea of insta-love/falling in love with someone you just met, which is an astounding lack of self awareness. Their relationship has no foundation, and Julian himself is a husk of a man whose only role is to be hot and morally grey.

The rest of the characters were essentially nonexistent. Despite this being a game with lots of players and performers, we never really get a sense of the community (just like with their home island). A few other characters are relevant: Tella, Legend, a man named Dante, Scarlett's father, and the mysterious Count. But they're all more of ideas than people. They exist for Scarlett to react to, not to be their own fully fleshed out characters with motivations and desires.

Actually, that's not true. Their father was evil. His wrongdoing had no sense of intention. He was seemingly abusing his daughters and being a general menace to everyone else just because it was fun. Like, the book just needed a villain, so we have this guy given no drive out of making his daughter's miserable for some reason. Also, some of the stuff he did was really, truly horrific — call it a spoiler or call it a trigger warning, but at some point he tries to force someone (that I won't spoil) to essentially rape Scarlett. This event is entirely brushed over. I hate when authors make their villains do real evil things and also fail to build a story that is able to hold those things. Again, it seems like we're supposed to see him more like a boogeyman, because everyone would treat things like rape and murder to be at the same level as manipulation and mean language.

Moving on from bad characterization, the writing in general was just really bad. Instead of building out a dialect or language for her fantasy world, this author had everyone talk in some bizarre mix of old fashioned English, modern therapy language, and cliches. Attitudes and manners of speaking would change rapidly, and I think I was supposed to forgive this because of the whole performance/lying thing, but this never felt fully realized. In fact, I'd say messing with a book character's style of speech is a good way to indicate to the reader when things are real or not real, but the author didn't actually take advantage of this. People just changed personalities wildly, making it hard to keep up.

The plot was bewildering. Setting us up with the concept of "nothing is real/don't trust anything you see" is really hard to pull off well because it takes away all the stakes. Especially when you spend the entire book undoing every tense thing that happens. Again, this just makes the plot hard to follow. Meanwhile, this book had a really bad habit of saying an important detail at the beginning, ignoring it for the entire book, and then bringing it back at the end to try to prove to me that the book was planned out. You could try to argue that this was helping the reader stay grounded on what was real and what wasn't, but it wasn't those details. The things that were ignored were crucial worldbuilding facts and highly relevant character details that Scarlett just chose to not care about. Well, Scarlett, I cared, and it would've been nice for the main character and the author to care as much about the plot as I did.

I was also never really sold on the concept of Caraval itself. I get that it's like one big role playing/scavenger hunt game with actors leading the players through a story, but this session was entirely about Scarlett and Donatella. I'm still unclear about if there were other players or not, and, if there were, what they were doing. The whole thing felt kind of like the first season of "The Good Place." And once you're playing the game, is there a way to be successful? Scarlett stumbled through the entire thing, but I can accept that she's just clueless. The players were given a sheet of paper with some "clues," but they were entirely arbitrary and seemingly impossible to use as an actual guide. I feel like if you're going to center your whole book about the concept of this game then it should be a little bit more clear what we're getting into. Unfortunately, everything this author did was motivated by her thinking, "Isn't this so cool and magical?" instead of an attempt to create a cohesive and engaging story.

I was clearly not interested in this book. It had potential to be a good book, but it seems like the author didn't bother thinking anything through outside of the aesthetics.