Wildcard was a Wild Ride!

Finally, the wait is over!  Today was Wildcard‘s release day and I was so happy to get to read it.  The wait was worth it, though, it was a great book.

As with all of my reviews that deal with sequels, this may contain spoilers to the first book.

Our book starts right after Hideo downloads a program that takes away a person’s free will to commit crimes.  This causes some trouble right off the bat.  People are turning themselves in for crimes they committed but got away with, crime was prevented… wait, how could that cause problems?  We don’t all have the same standards about what is right and wrong.  Some countries have different laws that they want enacted.  Other wealthy people want exceptions for them (isn’t that the way the world works?).  To quote page 106 “Everyone’s going to want something different from Hideo.”

Emika quickly finds herself getting tangled up with Zero.  For a long time here, it’s hard to figure out who is the bad guy and who is not.  Hideo is trying to do something good by ridding the world of crimes like those that caused him to lose his brother, while Zero wants people to be able to make their own choices.  There seemed to be nobody in this book that had power that was actually good.

Time is ticking away for those that are trying to fix everything.  The beta version of the Warcross lenses (which Emika and most of the Warcross players have, and doesn’t take away your free will) will be upgraded on the final day of the Warcross season.  Emika must rely on her friends (and put faith into people she’s not so sure of) in order to figure out what’s going on and how to set things straight before the lenses upgrade and nobody has free will anymore.

Eventually, we find out the truth… which I won’t give away… but I really wasn’t expecting that.  There is a satisfying ending to it all.

One of the things that I’ve loved about the Legend series and The Young Elites trilogy were the love relationships.  I’m a big Day/June and Adelina/Magiano fan.  While this book does have a love interest, it’s a fairly minor part of the storyline, and I was fine with that.  The Warcross/Wildcard story takes place over a span of only a few months, while Legend and The Young Elites both cover a time span of over a year, so perhaps it is more realistic for the characters to not develop a deep love for each other anyway.

This book caused me to feel anger and happiness and cry, sometimes all in the same chapter.  In chapter 20, we find out what actually happened to Sasuke, and I found myself thinking, “oh, that’s sad.  Oh, how sweet.  I’m in tears now.  I’m so angry!” And then shock.  Later on, in chapter 32, I was really tearing up.  Especially when they were talking about loved ones… about how Emika missed her father and she says “And that’s when I realize that, at the end, we’d all wish for the same thing.  Just a little more time.”  I was thinking of my grandma as I read that:  how she seemed to be in remission from cancer, and then one day I got a phone call, and the next day she was gone.

The book says a lot about artificial intelligence and computer technology, and delves into some of the issues that we may have to deal with in the very near future.  Ray Kurzweil believes that one day we’ll be able to upload ourselves into the cloud and live forever that way.  Is that something we want to do?  Is that life?  Do we live on in people’s memories?  What role should technology play in our lives?  These questions popped up in my mind as I was reading Wildcard.

This was a great story that I highly recommend.

Previously on this blog, I reviewed Warcross.