The Boundless

I loved the idea of a fanciful train going across the land and kids investigating. The bad guys were scarier than I expected. The train was as fanciful as I expected. There was more to the circus than I expected. But there was all those pieces didn't quite come together.

Did not finish at 80% I am genuinely disappointed. I wanted to read this book for such a long time and honestly, I usually love middle grade things. There is some sort of magic in them, this genuine joy for all the spooky and wonderful things. They are also often handle things in a very delicate and subtle way, which leaves room for the kids to take them at their own pace and just keep some of the childlike wonder. This, though. Oh, god. This book did the very same thing that I dislike with many of the popular, trendy YA reads; it tried to send its messages with the subtlety of a rail spike being hammered into the back of your skull (see how witty I am????). Up until about half way things just happened. Then suddenly in a few pages we get a lecture on how being a girl is the most horrible, because men whistle at you. How minorities can only ever be victims and white people are the worst. Also, how the only white people who are not automatically horrible are poor. If you are rich, you are default dick. It felt like the author just got a message that he really needs to insert these messages NOW, with the least possible delicate touch known to mankind, even making the characters say things like “Oh, no, fucking over poor people is indeed a bad thing”. Really? REALLY? You don't say. Here is how the story goes, which will only make things make less sense. A poor boy's (Will) father works on building the train tracks, so he goes to meet him. It ends in a mess, but results in the family's luck picking up and with them ending up rich, the dad being a boss with the railway company. Years later, on the first ride of the biggest train ever, the boy ends up separated from his father, being targeted by evil murderers preparing for a big burglary. His only helpers are a circus crew, with a wonderful and gorgeous girl (Maren) and a mysterious boss, who has his own secrets. Here comes one of my issues. A child who grew up poor would not be so sheltered. He is about 16-17 during the train ride, so up until puberty or so he was part of the lower class. Don't freaking tell me he had absolutely no idea that life wasn't just super easy. Why make him poor THEN rich when you still play him as this clueless little moron who only knows first class train cars and good education? Also, he is almost considered a man during the time period. He still acts like a small child. I understand shy and late bloomer characters existing, but it feels like the author didn't understand that back in he day teenage years weren't exactly what they are now. I remember praising Rick Yancey's [b:The Monstrumologist 6457229 The Monstrumologist (The Monstrumologist, #1) Rick Yancey https://d2arxad8u2l0g7.cloudfront.net/books/1307409930s/6457229.jpg 6647553] for avoiding this exact thing, but that one was a much darker book. The love in this was ridiculous as well. For some reason Will falls in love with Maren after 3 minutes of talking and her stealing his Sasquatch tooth. After years of not forgetting about her, they meet on the train and she is just ridiculously perfect. It's not real. It's just so arbitrary and I felt like it had absolutely no foundation, you just have to take the author's word for it, which is something I genuinely dislike. Sell it to me! This book just lost the exact thing that I love in middle grade. It wasn't charming. It wasn't delicately made. Somehow it was almost like the author couldn't decide to tone down and go for middle grade or to take it up a notch and turn it YA. It went from ladida, sweet, adorable and innocent into genocide territory without anything in between or even building up some gigantic shock and impact. It just happened, because the author realised that whoopsies, he probably should go heavily didactic. I could have probably given in 2 stars. I even intended to do so, but the story just didn't push me to finish. It wasn't really there. Sure, Will was being pursued by people wanting to kill him for seeing too much, but... Here comes the middle grade-YA stuff again. I didn't feel the pressure. I didn't feel that I had to be afraid for real, because it just wasn't edgy enough like that. I don't think the author had thought this through good enough. His target audience, his goals with this story. It was all a mishmash, disjointed mess. The sentence structures simple, the characters naive, the didactic parts extremely serious and just right to the face with force. I don't even know. All aboard the disappointment train... leaving for WTF-just-happened town.