Review Detail

Unexpected, fast-paced, and taking place over the course of just a couple of days, Rip Tide, Kat Fall's sequel to Dark Life, pulled me under and held me there until I was finished and could catch a breath!

I have to admit, I was not prepared for this sequel to be better than the first book. I expected more of the moody and stoic main character, Ty, and his friend Gemma's secrecy, to take primary roles again. And although they remained stoic and secretive, the array of old but reintroduced and new characters spiced up the daredevil plot much more skillfully than in Dark Life.

It has been just a few months since Ty's Topsider friend Gemma moved in with his family and then abruptly moved out. Their relationship has been cloudy ever since, and this, along with the recent changes in the subsea colonies' relationships with the government and other settlement groups, is in the forefront of Ty's mind when he and Gemma discover a sunken township, Nomad. The townships are floating towns populated by surfs, people who don't live on the mainland or underwater, like Ty's family. When his parents try to negotiate a deal with another township and end up kidnapped, Ty desperately tries to get help from the newly assigned Seaguard captain, Captain Revas--but she seems so caught up in figuring out what happened to the Nomad that he gives up and takes things into his own hands. When Gemma finds out that her brother is going to fight in a boxing match on the surf-dominated Rip Tide, an old oil-rig that has turned into a casino-like community, Ty decides his chances of finding his parents are better there. What follows their entry onto Rip Tide is a crazy sequence of events that only seems to lead Ty further from figuring out the truth. He and Gemma try to work with the Seablite Gang and her brother, the outlaw Shade, to find clues to solve the mystery, although no one seems to care about them as much as their own wealth or greed. Once it seems Ty has narrowly escaped one danger, he walks right into another. The plot twists are fantastic and the action is jam-packed, with plays on many of the fears that accompany time in or on the ocean. One lead takes Ty to another surf-inhabited outpost, where the stakes climb even higher. And the discovery of another township chained to the ocean floor leaves Ty with no choice but to give up the search for his parents to save the very people who hate him. A page-turning, showstopping sequel you will not want to miss.