For one, Alyssa is in Scotland right now starting her year at St. Andrews (😱 🙌 ). We are both on our way to trudge through our second year of undergrad. And no big deal, but Alyssa has also been working on like 3 different novels nonstop - it's crazy!
Things that haven't changed:
I'm still in a pretty deep reading slump, which is why I felt compelled to write a review on Warcross by Marie Lu!
The fact that I've been able to finish this in less than a span of three months is a big feat on its own. Something about Marie Lu's characterization and world building always pulls me in, and this one was no exception. I loved the colorful, futuristic, alternate universe of New York and Tokyo. It's the first time I've read about something technologically advanced that isn't automatically deemed as a dystopian. If you loved Legend by Marie Lu as much as I did, you would know that it's difficult to restrain yourself from comparing any novel by her to June and Day's story. I found myself doing exactly this and realized that right off the bat, Warcross immerses itself quite well in the sci-fi genre. In fact, almost all the action scenes are based on virtual reality, so depending on whether or not you would like that concept, you'll find yourself either loving the refreshing way she describes these scenes or being frustrated that the tech-savvy jargon is a bit harder to grasp.
Like I said, I really love, admire, and trust Marie Lu's writing, so when an insta-romance appeared between the two main characters, I was a little dubious with the way she approached it. Because of Day and June, I was used to a love story with a gradual arc and unpredictable complexity. Something about Emika and Hideo (the main characters in Warcross) was just too easy for me to believe it completely - almost to the point where the romance got stale, became nothing but pages of lustful kisses and secret rendezvous that proved to be irritatingly irrelevant to the main plot arc. I should have known a plot twist was in the works though.
The only thing that was kind of a bummer was that Hideo's complexity didn't surface until the last ten pages or so. Because of that, I felt like I didn't receive the satisfaction of watching him grow. I did appreciate it a lot when Emika stayed true to her character, instead of caving into the tempting romance that usually dictates a lot of protagonists' alliances. To be honest, by the end of the book, I found myself being intrigued the most by Zero, the villain. His mysteriousness, meticulousness, and unpredictability aligned more with the interesting characters that Marie Lu usually has in her novels (aka Day).
I do wish that it wasn't such a cliff-hanger. There were so many loose ends that weren't tied by the end, which was why I gave the book a lower rating than I anticipated when I was first starting it. The beginning was the best part for me because all the excitement of being in this new, well-developed world was enough to keep turning the page. (Also, I think it's important to note that I was probably a bit biased. The story that I've been brewing up in my head for the past 2 years has some eerily similar aspects to Lu's world and I wanted to keep reading to figure out if it my story had in fact already been written by this best-selling author. Luckily - and with Alyssa's reassurance - it wasn't exactly the same, which gives me a HUGE relief.)
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| Emika Fan Art (image from Entertainment Weekly) |
Goodreads Summary: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/29385546-warcross?ac=1&from_search=true
Rating: 3.5/5
