Carve the Mark Book Review: Veronica Roth Built a Whole New Universe and I Wanted More of It

Rating: ★★★★

"Carve the Mark" Book Review:

Carve the Mark is Veronica Roth's first post-Divergent novel, and you can feel her stretching into a bigger canvas. Where Divergent was one city, one system, one test — this is an entire galaxy of planets connected by a sentient energy field called the current, and every person in it is born with a currentgift that shapes who they become. It's ambitious, messy, and more interesting than it has any right to be.

The story follows two characters from opposite sides of a conflict. Akos Kereseth is a gentle boy from the peaceful nation of Thuvhe, kidnapped by soldiers from the brutal Shotet nation and forced to serve their leader. Cyra Noavek is the sister of that leader — Ryzek, a tyrant who uses Cyra's currentgift, which manifests as constant agonizing pain she can transfer through touch, as a weapon and a torture device. Akos's gift is the ability to disrupt the current, which means he can silence Cyra's pain. Their relationship — captor and captive who become something more complicated — drives the novel.

Roth's worldbuilding is her biggest leap forward here. The current is a genuinely original concept, functioning simultaneously as physics, religion, and destiny. Each planet has its own culture, its own relationship to the current, and the Shotet — nomadic, ritualistic, defined by a ceremonial journey called the sojourn — are fascinating in their complexity. They're not simply villains. They're a colonized people with a warrior culture born from oppression, and Roth treats that with more nuance than the marketing suggested.

The novel drew criticism for its depiction of the Shotet as darker-skinned aggressors against the lighter-skinned Thuvhesit, and that criticism isn't unfounded — the optics are careless even if the text itself is more nuanced than the summary suggests. Roth has addressed this and made adjustments in later editions.

Austin Butler and Emily Rankin narrate, and their alternating perspectives give each protagonist a distinct voice.

Four stars. A flawed but genuinely ambitious space opera that proves Roth has bigger stories in her than faction systems.

If You Liked Carve the Mark, Try:

• An Ember in the Ashes by Sabaa Tahir — Two protagonists on opposite sides of an oppressive system, forced together by circumstance. Same dual-perspective energy, different world.

• The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin — A more literary and devastating version of a world where people's bodies become weapons. A masterpiece.

• Red Rising by Pierce Brown — Another YA-crossover space opera about caste systems and revolution, but turned up to eleven.

  
  

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf

If you enjoyed this book review, check out How to Win a Million Dollars and Shit Glitter — a queer memoir that reads like a novel, following one person from Iowa to Broadway to Paris to a game show stage, learning at every stop that reinvention is the only survival skill that matters.

Learn More: How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter

How to Win One Million Dollars and Shit Glitter by Luke Stoffel