Seleste Reviews: Incarnate by Jodi Meadows
January 24, 2012 in Young Adult Reviews
Hardcover: 384 pages- Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books (January 31, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0062060759
- ISBN-13: 978-0062060754
- Price: $17.99
- Jodi Meadows’s Website
Buy Incarnate at:
NEWSOUL
Ana is new. For thousands of years in Range, a million souls have been reincarnated over and over, keeping their memories and experiences from previous lifetimes. When Ana was born, another soul vanished, and no one knows why.NOSOULEven Ana’s own mother thinks she’s a nosoul, an omen of worse things to come, and has kept her away from society. To escape her seclusion and learn whether she’ll be reincarnated, Ana travels to the city of Heart, but its citizens are suspicious and afraid of what her presence means. When dragons and sylph attack the city, is Ana to blame?HEARTSam believes Ana’s new soul is good and worthwhile. When he stands up for her, their relationship blooms. But can he love someone who may live only once, and will Ana’s enemies–human and creature alike–let them be together? Ana needs to uncover the mistake that gave her someone else’s life, but will her quest threaten the peace of Heart and destroy the promise of reincarnation for all?
Much of young adult literature deals with feeling out of place–in high school, a new town, human society as a supernatural, etc. What Incarnate does is takes that trope of the genre and turns it up about as high as it can go. In the world Jodi Meadows created there are a million souls born over and over again into new bodies. They die, they come back, life goes on, and this is the only life they know. Until Ana.
When a soul known as Ciana dies, she doesn’t return. In her place is Ana. Newsoul to some. Nosoul to others. She’s an outcast simply by being born. Her mother takes her from the city to raise her in seclusion, her upbringing filled with hatred and abuse. Even once she turns eighteen and is free to leave, her mother sends her into the wilderness with a broken compass–a calculated move that nearly leads to Ana’s death. Instead she finds Sam, a man who sees her as not an abomination, but something rare and precious and wonderful. However, because of how she’s grown up, it takes weeks before she can even begin to trust that he isn’t going to try to kill her too. And once they get to the city, Heart, Ana finds out her mother might have been more right than wrong with her lies–far too many people don’t want her around and make no bones about letting her know.
This is the set-up for a tragic story of pain, love, music, hate, and what happens when those in power set their sights on one person. I’m not going to delve into the plot a lot simply because if I did it would be full of spoilers and me squeeing about how fabulous certain things were. As a heads up to people who like simple plots without a lot going on, Incarnate has a LOT of plot elements from supernatural creatures to religion to a lesson in music theory to romance. However, for me, it never felt like there was too much going on. Everything fit and flowed.
There have been a lot of dystopian novels in the last few years, with even more slated for 2012. What sets Incarnate apart isn’t just that it takes place in a different world with living buildings and sylph and dragons. It isn’t even really the reincarnation angle. While most dystopians focus on a small group of the government trying to keep the people as a whole docile and (often) ignorant, Incarnate has a large section of society that focuses all that control on Ana. She’s the thing that “ruined” their perfect society. And in that difference lies the book’s true power. It narrows our attention to her, to one victim of hate.
In short, it’s brilliant and beautiful and tragic. There are books that sell millions of copies right away and there are books that stick around forever. While the series still has two more books in it, based on the first one, I truly hope the NewSoul Trilogy manages to do both.
















