Cress!

Cress, by Marissa Meyer.

Cress was absolutely marvelous, far exceeding the mediocre Scarlet. 4/5 stars.

It picks up almost immediately after the end of Scarlet, with our ragtag band of heroes preparing to save the earth from the Lunar Queen, Levana.  This time though, there's a new friend: Cress, a hacker who lives on a satellite orbiting the moon.  She's the Lunar's secret weapon, jamming scanners and hacking secure networks under the orders of Sybil Mira.  (You may remember her form the previous books.)  Cress hasn't had contact with another person in seven years, and alleviates this loneliness by creating a SIRI-like interface for her computer, and by hacking earthen secure networks and security feeds.  After she views Cinder's escape on the cameras, she decides to help our heroes in their quest to depose Levana and crown Cinder as the rightful queen.  Cress' newfound resolution sets a cascade of events in motion, ending with a botched rescue attempt and the separation of our heroes.

Cress takes the tangled (ha!) storylines of its predecessor and weaves them together into a cohesive narrative with fabulous characters and a twisty, suspenseful plot.  Like the other books in the series, Cress has the obligatory romance, but here it's downplayed, unusual, and something one actually wants to read, unlike Scarlet's rather weird relationship with Wolf.  Cress is a magnificent lead, relatable and balanced.  Overall, much more nuanced and interesting than Scarlet and maybe even Cinder.

4/5 stars.

Expiration Day

An introspective, unusual entry into an overcrowded field.

Tania Deeley is a robot.  Called a “Teknoid”, she and her fellow robots were created to appease the desire for offspring in the wake of global infertility.  For reasons unknown, people suddenly became unable to bear children, and Oxted corporation stepped in with robot replacement children to prevent the collapse of society.  The Teknoids are near perfect human copies, and are leased to parents until the age of eighteen, when they are taken by Oxted and never seen again.  Tania had been told by her parents that she was human, until an unfortunate accident involving a boat exposes her true identity.  Despite the realization that she isn’t human, Tania continues to mature and grow like any normal child, exploring her Teknoid status and trying to figure out if she’s really a person or just a possession, incapable of creativity and emotion.  But her time is running out.

Written in Tania’s diary entries, Expiration Day breaks the standard YA mold.  There is no star-crossed romance here, no struggle against a totalitarian government.  Tania is a normal girl struggling to figure out who (or what) she is.  This lends her character a reassuring stability, and makes her relatable to the vast majority of the target audience.  However, the worldbuilding is seriously lacking, without any grounding to make the setting plausible.  The ending is also far too neat, wrapping up Tania’s story without resolving anything else.  (Spoilers:  it involves aliens in the far, far future.)  Breaking the book into sections are commentary by the aforementioned alien(s) who find Tania’s diary.  These “intervals” add absolutely nothing, except implausibility.  Despite this, the plot leaps and soars high above the standard tropes.

A breath of fresh air in a crowded genre.  3.75/5 stars.

Hi Folks!

Hi Folks!
This will soon be a blog dedicated almost exclusively to book reviews, both pre and post release.  I'll post reviews of ARCS when I can, and if I don't, I'll post a review of whatever I'm currently reading.  The books I'll review will be almost exclusively YA books, with the exceptions of things like A Game of Thrones.  I'm expecting to post once weekly, with some variation depending on what's going on.  So check back often!
Farewell for now!
-The Overly Excitable Nerd