Teaser Tueasday: Carve the Mark by Veronica Roth

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Ambrosia of The Purple Booker.
To play along just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

Carve the Mark by Veronica Roth.

Carve the Mark –
Katherine Tegen Books

My mother had always talked quietly when she was angry. She said it made people listen.
— Chapter 9

You know her well. People are harder to sum up when you know them well.
— Chapter 28

Coming from such a big success as the Divergent series it seems quite a feat to follow up with a similarly striking story. Veronica Roth has devised a highly impressive and well-crafted universe with an interesting cast of characters. There have been quite a number of reviews both praising and rebuking. Both are well understandable as there are aspects in this book that are truly inspiring as well as parts that can be worrying if you look at them unreflecting. At first, the two opposing cultures can seem a little one-dimensional or even stereotypical but you should never meet a book at its face value, especially not if it’s written by someone who already created a character like Tris. (Without spoiling that series, but if you know what happened to Tris and that the author carried that knowledge and also the motivation for this action through three books, this should erase any doubt that the characterisation of anything in this new story is lazy or thoughtless.)
The one thing I found a little difficult were the first steps into this story with all its unknown rules and beliefs while also almost immediately picking up pace in terms of plot development. It felt a little like I was halfway across the planet before I even understood what was going on. This feeling of disorientation would perfectly match the reader-emotion to the main character Akos. However, at exactly that moment the narration switches to the other main character Cyra, who is at that point very much at home and certain of her position. The moment this changes the narration switches up again as well and I dare say that this is a supremely clever narrative device. Veronica Roth is a master-crafter and I’d say right now the only danger to her story is that of over-playing the strength of plotting. I can’t wait where the second and in this case final book is going to take us.

I won’t ask if you’ve read the author’s previous books. Instead I want to know how you react when you encounter the title of a book inside the text. In this case it made me nod in satisfaction when the phrase carve the mark finally appeared. Share your thoughts and teasers in the comments.