Lizard Radio--"Life is about ambiguity" OR "The Lizard People were just a red herring!"

Title: Lizard Radio

Author: Pat Schmatz


What it’s about (in 75 words or fewer): Kivali is sent to CropCamp, a place where the SayFree government sends teenagers go to become productive adult members of society.  Gender-neutral Kivali (nicknamed Lizard) feels different from the other campers, but she knows she must either try to fit in or accept her place as an outcast, which would send her to Blight, a government-sanctioned area for criminals and other non-conforming citizens.  Lizard also wonders: was she sent here from another planet?

What I think (in 250 words or fewer): At the beginning of Lizard Radio, I thought of Scott Westfeld's Uglies because slang was used immediately by the main characters and readers had to figure it out as they read, such as mealio (cafeteria), cleezies (chores), and jazzing (messing around).  Another similarity to the Uglies dystopia was when teenagers came of age, they would be controlled by the government: Uglies with plastic (and brain) surgery and CropCampers with the kickshaw.

The Uglies similarities ended, Lizard Radio was slooooowww, and I had a hard time getting through it, but I was determined to, since I had just written a post on books I DNF.  Every time Lizard would ask her counselor a question, the counselor would evade and say "it all will make sense later" or totally just ignore the question entirely.  Threats were made to "expul" campers, but nothing seemed to happen. When I was on page 180, I still had no idea what was going on in the story.

The "big reveal" was anticlimactic, and lots of plot was squished into a couple of chapters, and I began to realize the unanswered questions were the point of the book. Life is about ambiguity and does not have any right or wrong answers--at least that's my best English teacher interpretation of Lizard Radio.

Unexplained events:  people disappear into thin air; children are rarely conceived naturally; and Lizard is able to achieve almost out-of-body meditative states.  And the lizard people were just [a] red herring, to my disappointment. 


This book is on the 2016 Rainbow Book List.


My final takeaway (in 75 words or fewer):  I hate it when I dislike a book because I am not that hard to please, and I usually like the books I read for this blog (they are award-winners for a reason).  I did not like this book and would not recommend it, unless you're a hardcore Dystopian fan wanting to read all the books in that genre.

I do recommend the Uglies series and wish Lizard Radio had been more similar to it.


Memorable quotes/passages from the book:

• "My gram vaped.  My da says one mornin she just wasn't there. No body, nothing.  Just blip, vape gone.  He says my gram was too wise and beautiful to stay on this earth, too exceptional.  I never met her.  It happened before I was born" (hardback edition, pgs. 40-41).  
• "Her touch blasts my skin, jazzes through my blood, liquefies my legs.  Our faces draw closer, and then closer" (pg. 75).
• "The question I left for your consideration last time was whether that independence was an asset or a liability.  Independence without initiative is just reaction, rebellion" (pg. 97).
• "Lizard or human? Choose. . . Neither and both . . . That's where your power lies" (pg. 238).

Other reviews: Washington Independent Review of Books and Randomly Reading

This book is available in the Greensboro Public Library.