Today is the first day of a four day The 100 blog series! I got the full box set for Christmas last year. I finally started them a couple of weeks ago and was hooked! Originally, I watched the first two seasons of the show on Netflix. Turns out I’m at least two seasons behind. Whoops!
The CW series follows “the one hundred”: a group of 100, under-18 teenagers who were convicts up in space. There was a large nuclear war three hundred years ago that brought about the end of Earth, and there was an exodus of people to space. It’s up to the one hundred to find out if Earth is inhabitable after all these years, now that the Colony up in space is deteriorating.
Phew! Doesn’t that sound interesting?!
Initial Thoughts on The 100
I honestly thought that the book would be a close pairing to the television series. It’s been a few years since I saw the show, but I thought I remembered it fairly well. The novel only concentrates on a few select characters: Clarke, Wells, Bellamy, and Glass. I remember the first three from the show, but I believe they dropped Glass (probably for the best). The story is a mixture of both present-day as well as flashbacks. We do get a ton of backstory for the characters and how they came to be where they are today.
I’m a big fan of novels like this, where there are stories from multiple points of view. I feel like you get a lot more story for the quantity you’re actually reading. I could really relate to each individual character and it made the novels much easier to read. Kass Morgan also write the points of view in a way that the story is continuous. It’s not, “Clarke was doing this. While she was doing this, Wells was doing that.” It’s a seamless flow from one character to another to keep the timeline moving along.
Overall
Yes, The 100 is a “young adult” novel. For starters, that just means that it’s wonderfully simple to read. I’ve also read some pretty heavy books recently, so it was nice to take a step back and do something a bit simpler. After reading Ember, I was super happy to move on to something that I actually enjoyed reading. The 100 was immediately engaging and keep me entertained until the end.
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