Starters (Starters, #1)

Starters by Lissa Price

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

During the Spore Wars, genocide spores killed every person between twenty and sixty years of age, thus reducing the population to Starters and Enders, those who were once most vulnerable. Since Callie and her baby brother Tyler have no living grandparents or any other family older than sixty, they are now unclaimed and squatting in a ruined building, together with many others. The only way for an unclaimed teen to earn some money is to rent their body for a month or more to an Elder through a company named Prime Destinations. With a sick brother and no place to go, Callie is forced to do just that. But her renter isn’t just an old lady looking to have some fun in a young body. She is on a mission to destroy Prime Destinations and Callie has no choice but to get involved.


Based on the reviews I’ve read so far, most people had issues with Price’s worldbuilding. I didn’t. Wiping out the entire population between twenty and sixty is, admittedly, a bold move, but if an outbreak were to happen, something similar to the described Spore Wars, we probably would inoculate children and old people first. What I found harder to believe was that the society would so easily discard unclaimed minors (children with no grandparents or guardians). If all you had were old people and kids, you’d first ensure the survival of your species by taking care of those who can actually reproduce.


The process of renting out teenage bodies to old people reminded me a little of that horrible movie Surrogates with Bruce Willis and that blonde actress whose name I always forget. (It’s Radha Mitchell, I googled her. If you ask me in five minutes, I probably won’t be able to remember.) It took a while for me to think of the movie because, up until that point, I had been doing my damndest to forget I ever even saw it. It wasn’t until I remembered it that I realized that Price hasn’t given us enough information on what happens to Elders’ bodies while they’re renting a teen. I can believe that they would stay in a chair connected to tubes and wires and surrounded by nurses for a week, but how exactly would that work long term? When they started talking about a permanent arrangement, I got a mental image of an old, wrinkled body rotting and melting in a chair. I’ll probably need to wash my brain with soap… again.


However, I think Callie was the source of most of my problems with Starters. Everything she did, from going into Prime Destinations, renting her body for a limited time, to helping Helena fight the Old Man and the Senator, seemed entirely selfless. And yet I never believed her. It seemed awfully convenient that she would have a sick baby brother to take care of, thus making Prime Destinations her only viable option. Perhaps I’d have been more comfortable with that if Price chose to explore their relationship a little bit more. I simply wasn’t as emotionally invested as I should have been and I felt that first Michael, and later a complete stranger, were doing a much better job of taking care of Callie’s brother than Callie ever did.

Starters was focused more on the technical, and less on the emotional side of the story which rarely works for me. However, I have many friends who enjoyed this book. If you’re into dystopias with sci-fi elements, I say go for it. Despite the issues I’ve mentioned (which may not even be issues for some), Starters is a solidly written and action-packed novel that will surely have a lot of fans.