Impostors (2018)
Written by: Scott Westerfeld
Genre: Young Adult/Science Fiction
Pages: 405 (Hardcover)
Series: Fifth book in the Uglies series
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Why I Chose It: I’ve been a Westerfeld fan since the original release of Uglies, back in 2005, and since then, I’ve read just about every YA book and short story he’s written.
The premise:
Frey and Rafi are inseparable…two edges of the same knife. But Frey’s very existence is a secret.
Frey is Rafi’s twin sister, and her body double. Their powerful father has many enemies, and the world has grown dangerous as the old order falls apart. So while Rafi was raised to be the perfect daughter, Frey has been taught to kill. Her only purpose is to protect her sister, to sacrifice herself for Rafi if she must.
When her father sends Frey in Rafi’s place as collateral in a precarious deal, she becomes the perfect impostor, as poised and charming as her sister. But Col, the son of a rival leader, is getting close enough to spot the killer inside her. As the deal starts to crumble, Frey must decide if she can trust him with the truth…and if she can risk becoming her own person.
No spoilers for this book, but contains very mild spoilers for previous books in the series
Discussion: Here’s a quick, spoiler-free recap in case you haven’t read the previous books in the Uglies series or it’s been a while and you don’t feel like going back to reread them:
The world as we know it is almost completely destroyed when someone releases a biological agent that corrupts and devours fossil fuels. Uglies begins a few hundred years after that, in a future where people live in fairly isolated city-states. It’s also a future wherein everyone, when they reach their sixteenth birthday, is given a surgery to become a pretty, because in a world where everyone is pretty, everyone is also happy, and the threats of the past remain just that.
Then a young woman, Tally Youngblood, joins the Resistance and changes everything. She and her friends uncover a plot by a nebulous world government to not only make everyone pretty, but also easily distracted and compliant. When Tally brings the “mind-rain,” a cure that frees everyone from their docility, humanity regains its best traits—the desires for freedom and independence—as well as its worst impulses—expansion at any cost to us or the environment, the needs of some for power and control.
Impostors is set about fifteen or sixteen years after Tally brings the mind-rain. No one has seen or heard from her in a long time, and the tension between certain city-states has almost escalated to Rusty status. (We, the readers, are the Rusties.) In order to create an alliance between the powerful cities of Shreve and Victoria, Rafia and Frey’s father, who remains unnamed throughout the book, sends his “only” daughter as proof of his dedication to the tenuous compact. I say “only” because there are less than a dozen people who know that Frey, Rafia’s younger twin by twenty-some minutes, exists. To be clear, it’s Frey that he sends to Victoria—Frey posing as Rafi, which she’s done hundreds of times before.
While some of the locations in the this series are fairly clear—Diego is San Diego, the Cubans are Cuba—there are other places that are trickier to nail down. Rafi and Frey live in the oppressed city of Shreve, which, by my best guess, is a future version of Shreveport, Louisiana. However, the city of Victoria seems to be Ciudad Victoria, Mexico, the current capital of the Municipality of Victoria and the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. (It’s a couple hundred miles south of the U.S./Mexico border and a little way inland from the Gulf of Mexico.)
At any rate, Frey travels to Victoria to live with the Palafoxes—the ruling family there—and almost immediately falls for Col, the eldest son, who returns her affections. The rest of the book jumps back and forth between romantic moments and action sequences.
Westerfeld normally excels at both of these, creating delicious angst and nail-biting excitement with aplomb. Sadly, that’s not the case in Impostors, where most of the book, from the characters to the action to the world-building, feels rehashed. While all the previous books in the Uglies series revealed some crazy new surgery and/or technological marvel, we’ve seen just about everything in Impostors before. And the things we haven’t seen—a city-state ruled by an iron fist, the citizens constantly assaulted by propaganda and watched by “spy dust”—we’re told about rather than shown. The same goes for Frey and Rafi’s ruthless father, who doesn’t make an appearance until the very end of the book. This is especially frustrating in this day and age, when the image of a wealthy, power-hungry goblin who cares only about his image and his agenda could carry a lot of weight for the reader.
I was also disappointed by the short-shrift given to Frey and Rafi’s twisted upbringing. We’re meant to feel sorry for Frey, but Impostors begins with a scene in which she saves her sister from an assassination attempt. She’s poised, thinks quickly on her feet, and wins the day. Then she and her sister celebrate her triumph together. Frey doesn’t feel much guilt for killing the would-be assassin, nor does she resent her sister for her larger life.
Overall, the book’s largest issue is the lack of tension, and that seems to be caused by the amount of showing rather than telling. We’re told Frey and Rafi’s dad is horrible, and his actions are certainly awful, but for most of the book, they happen from a distance. We’re told the people of Shreve are downtrodden, but we never see what their lives are actually like, so it’s hard to get too invested, except in an abstract way, in their possible freedom. We are shown Victoria—a lovely city where the Palafoxes reign with care and consideration for their people—and Frey tells us how different it is from Shreve, but the comparison, like the comparison between Frey and Rafi’s lives, of which we see very little, is all but meaningless.
It isn’t until the end of the book that Westerfeld returns to form. Due to the aforementioned problems, the middle drags a bit, but, like the start of the book, Impostors ends with a bang and a twist that I definitely didn’t see coming. Basically, it ended with the sort of great writing, plotting, and emotion that I’ve come to expect from Westerfeld, making the rest of the book feel like a momentary lapse rather than a lasting example of his future works.
In Conclusion: You don’t need to read the previous books in the Uglies series to understand Impostors, but I do recommend them, especially since my previous investment in the world and the series is a large part of what kept me going through this book’s sagging middle. And the thing is, if you do make it through this book to the end, the payoff is more than worth it. Not only that, it’ll probably have you itching for the next book. I know I can’t wait to read it, and as a long-time fan of Westerfeld, here’s hoping he regains his footing and churns out another high-caliber entry in an otherwise stellar series.
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