Young adults who desire one of the few University places hope to be chosen for the Testing - a strenuous examination which is not merely academic - Zeen's father, who passed the Test, (despite being subject to the procedure to take away the memories' of Test subjects ensuring secrecy) reveals that he wasn't the first in his class of the applicants during the Testing, but those smarter students didn't make it.Testing Guide copyright © 2013 by Joelle CharbonneauĪll rights reserved. The prequel tells the story of Zeen (elder brother of The Testing's protagonist Malencia - "Cia") and how it was that Cia came to have a burning ambition to be chosen for the Testing, after what happened to her brother. This eleven-page story, teaser prequel to novel, The Testing (with a forty-page excerpt of The Testing after the prequel story), sets the scene locating the future post-apocalyptic world of The Testing in a post-war North America a century after war and global catastrophes destroyed much of the Earth's population and biomass leaving coastal cities submerged and toxic tainted soil.
So, what I'm basically saying is, it's free, so you might as well read it, but you're not missing anything if you don't. The problem with that is that I have a hard time believing a lot of people are going to pick up a random prequel-I know I, at least, only read these companion pieces if I've already read the original source material. If the point of this prequel was to provide a bit of background on the world of The Testing before actually reading the book, then there's perhaps enough here to do that-of the 40 pages, 10 of them are this bonus chapter, two are Q&A from "The Testing Guide" which gives you a smidge of the official history of the Seven Stages of War and its aftermath, and the remainder is the first three chapters of The Testing. What this chapter did give me is 1) hope that Zeen will be given a more prominent role in future books and 2) an answer to where Tosu City actually lies, which I admit I was quite curious about. All we get from this chapter is that Zeen resents not being chosen for The Testing (which we already knew) and that he sticks around only for the sake of his sister, Cia (which we could pretty much figure out).
I can't say that it particularly adds anything to the book-the only reason I'm rating it as high as I am is because I happen to like Zeen from the few small glimpses we've been given of him.
I wouldn't even say it qualifies as a short story-it's a bonus chapter, one that really can't be included in the book because the book is told in first person by a different character.
First off, it's a darn good thing this puppy was free, or there would've been a lot of irate people out there.
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