Review: 'The Undying Tower' by Melissa Welliver
Pub. Date: 10/7/2021
Publisher: Agora Books
What if living forever was a death sentence?
Decades after the discovery that a small percentage of the population has stopped ageing, the Avalonia Zone is in crisis. From overpopulation to food shortages, the ‘Undying’ have been blamed for the state’s problems, banished to the fringes of society, and punished for every minor infraction.
When sixteen-year-old Sadie takes the fall for an attack by a rebel group, The Alchemists, she suddenly finds herself wrenched away from her quiet life and from her ailing father.
Armed with little help and even less knowledge, Sadie is thrust into a cold and cryptic ‘correctional facility’ – The Tower. Here she’ll have to rethink everything she’s been told about the Undying population in an attempt to save the life she knows, protect a group of unlikely friends, and give voice to the voiceless in a society on the brink of catastrophic upheaval.
The first in a daring dystopian trilogy, The Undying Tower descends into the dark side of immortality and champions fighting for what’s right, especially when the world is against you.
Even though I'd technically noted that the protagonist was 16 and that The Undying Tower was marked as YA, it somehow didn't fully register with me until I got started with the book. And then I realised, very quickly, that this age group is no longer entirely my jam. I have adored Dystopian fiction for ages now and have enjoyed many of the YA books featuring it as well. I always knew a day might come when I kind of "aged out" of YA fiction to a certain extent. I don't think you have to be 16 to read a book featuring a 16-year old protagonist, not at all, but I do think a point comes where maybe you're no longer really engaged by their trials and tribulations? I've been reading more and more Fantasy fiction featuring "older" protagonists, in the sense that they're at least in their twenties, and this visit back into a younger protagonist therefore was intriguing. I had a bit more distance to the story of The Undying Tower because I couldn't entirely identify with the protagonist anymore, which by no measure means I did not enjoy my time reading this book. I had fun reading this first installment of The Undying Trilogy, but it was fun at a remove. The book does what it should, from a smooth pace to interesting action scenes and time for emotional beats. The themes it plays with, from classism and discrimination to health and autonomy, are very important and I'm glad to see a YA novel pick up on them. I probably would have been entirely into it ten years ago, which means I was fond of it now.
Sadie lives at least a century from now, in a UK which has renamed itself the Avalonia Zone and which is cut off from the rest of the world by a sea wall. When the Undying, people who stopped aging at 25 and seemingly live forever, were discovered, it triggered apocalyptic warfare and the Avalonia Zone is only slowly recovering. Sadie is relatively lucky though, if you ignore the fact her father needs a heart transplant desperately. Her world is defined by the difference between normal people and the Undying and aggression and retaliation against the latter mark Sadie's every day. When she is suddenly lumped in with them and finds herself at the Tower, Sadie has to start questioning what she knows, what she believes is right, and on whose side she finds herself. Sadie is a relatively convincing 16-year old who isn't out to save the world, who doesn't set out to become a revolutionary or save anything. She is quite blinkered, which is logical in this world, but she shows common sense throughout, which I appreciated. The world building is done largely through flashbacks and through the fact that Sadie is something of an odd one out at the Tower, so the reader gets a good, steady introduction to the world rather than an info-dump at the beginning. The other characters are built up well for what they need to be, with just enough details to make them stand out, but vague enough that the story can take them in any direction.
In The Undying Tower Melissa Welliver does exactly what she needs to do, which is establish its main character for the reader and her main priorities, before having everything in her life thrown into a tailspin. One thing I really appreciated about The Undying Tower as I pondered it after finishing was that while it plays with many of the tropes of YA Dystopian fiction, it manages to swerve those which we truly should leave behind in the 2000s. Romance is not a major plotline, there is no love triangle (thank God!), and the violence isn't overly sanitized to make it palatable. There is a real sense of threat in the second half of The Undying Tower and Welliver is actually willing to depict the horror as well. With all this, however, I still realised that I am no longer the audience for this book. I have read too many of them, first of all, which meant that I got the world pretty quickly and saw most of the plot twists coming. And I'm also no longer capable of spending this much time in the head of a 16-year old without getting a little over it. This is not at all an error or an issue with the book, however! I do want to make that clear, that is my reader preference which I need to be aware of. I've gotten to a point where my expectations have shifted slightly, so I need to read responsibly. I'm still pondering whether I would like to read the rest of the trilogy, as I am kind of intrigued where Welliver will take this.
I give this novel...
3 Universes!
The Undying Tower is a perfectly decent YA Dystopian novel, which plays with all its themes and tropes but avoids many of the pitfalls that marked the genre in the last decade or two. For those in the YA age group, I'd wholeheartedly recommend it, even if I'm no longer its target audience.
I'm the same way, I've been reading SO much less YA lately and I didn't even realize it at first, I just sorta shifted. I'm glad to hear this was good though, in spite of that, and it's nice that there are still good dystopia books out there. This sounds like a good one. No info dumping, no love triangle lol, and a character w/ common sense.
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