The Paper Gardens

I liked the story better when it was Parts: The Clonus Horror..

I had joked about the Divergent series being similar to that movie, but The Haven is on a completely different level of similar.

I've seen a lot of people comparing it to The Island (a 2005 Michael Bay movie), but even The Island was a rip-off of Clonus. People aren't going far enough back in their comparisons, here.

There was a huge copyright infringement law suit over the similarities between the two movies, where DreamWorks ended up settling with the company that produced Clonus.

The only major difference between Clonus and The Haven is that The Haven contains at least 50% more teenage angst.

I don't feel like putting together coherent sentences about this book at the moment. Instead, please enjoy a list of similar plot points/themes between Clonus and The Haven:

- isolated "school" setting near a city
- "students" are not told the truth about the outside world, and are instead given doctored versions of pre-existing texts and films
- males and females are kept separate from each other
- "students" are pulled away from the rest (in Clonus, they "graduate", in Haven, they're "sick" and need to be saved from an imagined disease), and in most cases are never seen again
- male starts talking to female against the rules
- male realizes that the things the instructors have told them don't quite add up, and that there's something going on
- male finds information on the outside world
- male tells female about his discoveries, and he's determined to run away
- "school" is not really a school, but is a clone farm where wealthy people can have copies of themselves created and raised to help keep the "donor" healthy
- clones are (understandably) horrified to find out they are being farmed for parts
- "donor" of male refuses to let his clone die to keep him healthy
- large, overlaying plot line of political debate over the morality of harvesting organs from clones/whether or not clones count as human beings

There were absolutely no surprises in this book for me.

I don't usually put in this many spoilers, and I don't usually like to hide my reviews because of them, but I just had to get all of that off my chest.

The only reason I gave this book 2 stars instead of 1 was because the book wasn't horribly written, and there were the occasional ideas to separate the two stories, like the idea of the Tonic.

Hmmm...I wonder if shelving this book as "send in the clones" would be considered a spoiler, or ironic...

Screw it. I'm gonna do it.