Review Detail

What I Loved: Emika Chen goes from 3 days from eviction and $13 dollars in her bank account to the secret bounty hunter to the billionaire, Hideo Tanaka with unlimited resources to catch a hacker. This all happens when she accidentally gets caught hacking her way into the opening ceremony of the tournament game of WARCROSS. She deals with a lot from this change. She is flown by private jet from New York to Tokyo. She must train with professionals when poverty has kept her from excelling honestly in the game past level 25. Then she is told that Hideo is intensely private, yet he keeps making time for her.
The world-building is very believable of a near-future time. Special glasses and lenses overlay virtual reality with the real world. There are also points you can earn in the game for real-world travel and daily tasks. That aspect of the story reminds me of her third book in the Legend Trilogy, Champion. Having read that book previously and Emika’s economic disadvantages made me question a bit of the potential for discussion of economic disparity and the link with criminal actions. It was never really a part of the discussion among the characters, but it seems ripe for potential discussion in a book club or classroom setting.
The fast pace of the story felt very appropriate given the events center around the gaming culture. Her trials feel very much like a video game where she can win or lose and power up with her real-life status as she succeeds.
I was impressed at the surprise turn of events at the end. The whole time as the reader the problem seems clear cut and we are working to one solution. The sides are easy to see of who is “good” and who is “bad” until suddenly that is not the case. I was thrown through a loop as well as Emika. That was very enjoyable because I did not see it coming at all, yet looking back on the plot it did set up the twist of events perfectly.
Final Verdict: This was a quick-paced read that was set in a very believable reality. In the end, we are faced with a moral dilemma that is not as easy to answer as it seems. The potential for the perfect police system and total peace sounds lovely. Then you think about the potential for hacking and bypassing the system and a population under total control by a select few and the inevitability for corruption would lead to a great thought exercise of what if? The setup for events like this in our future makes it worth debating as we truly are developing smarter, more intuitive computer systems that permeate our daily life. The implications of a world like this go beyond the excellent story that Marie Lu has given readers. For fans of Feed and Lies My Memory Told Me, this is a great story to read.