All posts tagged dystopian

Sky Without Stars Gets Five From Me

By Brookelorren on Leave a Comment
Sky Without Stars cover

When’s the next book coming out? You can’t just end it like this! That was my first reaction when finishing Sky Without Stars by Jessica Brody and Joanne Rendell, a story about three people living on the planet Laterre based on Les Miserables. It was an amazing book and I have to read the next one. I was fortunate enough to get a copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Sky Without Stars follows three characters with vastly different lives: Chatine, the girl who disguises herself as a boy and steals whatever she can to survive; Marcellus, a high ranking military officer who always feels like he has to prove something to his grandfather; and Alouette, who has been living in a library for most of her life. Their lives begin to intersect on the eve of what looks like a revolution.

As the book unfolds, we discover the truth about what’s really going on in this country. Each of our main characters has their eyes opened to what is going on, and they will have to make decisions to either be selfish, or act for the greater good of society, which might not be in their best interests. Unfortunately, the problems don’t get resolved in this book, so we have to wait for the next one. Is the next book out yet?

My favorite characters in this book are Marcellus and Chatine. I like Alouette as well, but I’m more attached to the other two. All three of them have facets that I like, but I hope I get to see Marcellus and Chatine together in the next book. We’ll see. There really isn’t a love triangle in Sky Without Stars, but I do expect to see one in the next book.

One of the things in this book that I thought was pretty cool was the French influence of it. A lot of the words were french-ified, which didn’t make it difficult to read, but gave it a different vibe. There are some French words smattered among the text; even though I speak some French, I didn’t understand every word at its first use, but that’s okay. Sky Without Stars makes it clear what the terms mean when it uses them. The royal family is a lot like King Louie and Marie Antoinette, and there is even a contraption that is similar to a guillotine. Of course, there’s also the threat of revolution in the air.

I highly recommend this book! The only think I don’t like, I think, is that I have to wait to read the next one.  The book doesn’t come out until March 26th, but you can pre-order it today.

The Wolf and the Rain is Worth Reading

By Brookelorren on Leave a Comment

The Wolf and the Rain coverI recently read The Wolf and the Rain by Tanya Lee.  It is a book about a dystopian world set in the future.  Although it was not my favorite book that I’ve read (even this month) it was fairly enjoyable.  I received an advanced reader copy of this book free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Wolf and the Rain follows the story of Samarra, who also goes by Sam.  She has a fairly good (although perhaps shady) job, in a place where good employment is scarce.  The world is a fairly dangerous place, where most people don’t know how to read, and knowledge of things like basic sanitation is limited.

The story switches back and forth between the North (where Sam works at this shady job) and the South, where there is a completely different storyline going on.  We know that Sam is from the South, and so it’s fairly simple to deduce that the storyline in the South is probably about her, but the whole switching back and forth between the two timelines can be hard to follow, at first.

In the South, life is completely different.  They know about basic sanitation.  People have work.  Yet everything seems so… regimented.  It almost feels as if the people in the South have no freedom or identity.  This is a huge contrast to the North, where chaos reigns, but people have choices to go to parties and aren’t told what to do for most of the day.

From the beginning of the story, Sam seems obsessed with the disappearance of a girl that she’s never met (in the Northern storyline, at least).  She spends her free time trying to track down the girl, even though it puts her into danger.  For much of the story, I was wondering “why does she care so much?”  This remains a mystery for most of the book.

While this is a dystopian book, there is also a puzzle to it.  You’re left trying to piece together why Sam is so interested in the missing girl, what happened to the girl, and how do the timelines from the North and the South intersect?  Sadly, you won’t get the answers to ANY of these questions as you read this book.  Although the puzzle starts to come together, it doesn’t completely form into a whole picture by the end.  There is supposed to be a sequel, and I guess the answers lie there.

The book started off slow.  The multiple timelines were confusing at first, and at first, I didn’t really care about the outcome all that much.  Towards the end of the book, after I got to know the characters and I started to figure out what was going on, it got interesting and I wanted to find out more.

I do plan on reading the sequel to The Wolf and the Rain at some point.  While this isn’t one of my favorite books, it was interesting and I thought it was worth reading.

Legend is One of My Favorite YA Trilogies

By Brookelorren on 7 Comments

Legend coverLast week I wrote about Marie Lu’s latest book, Warcross; today I’m writing about her debut trilogy, Legend.  The series consists of three books: Legend, Prodigy, and Champion.  If you haven’t read them yet, you are missing out.  Go read them right now.  I’ve read them several times myself, and I love this universe so much that I have published three fanfics about it on Archive of Our Own (with a fourth sitting unfinished on my desktop).  Since this is a completed trilogy that I’m not reading for the first time, I’m reviewing the trilogy as a whole, and not the books as separate entities.

Plot

The story begins on November 28, 2031 (which is a Wednesday, in case you’re curious).  Legend begins with the memorable line “My mother thinks I’m dead,” which immediately hooks you into the story.  Daniel Wing, now known as the notorious criminal “Day”, is hanging out with his best friend Tess.  They both live on the streets, eking out a living as best as they can.  The plague patrols are coming through, and Day is watching his family’s house, worried that his family might be sick.  It turns out, his younger brother Eden does have the plague.  Being the loving brother that he is, Daniel breaks into the hospital in order to try to steal some plague cure, setting off a chain of events that will change his life (and the country) forever.

June (our other protagonist) is a brilliant girl in her final year at the military academy.  She doesn’t fit in with the rest of her classmates because over the course of her childhood, she’s skipped several grades, and everyone around her is older than she is.  Her family is also about as wealthy as Day’s family is impoverished.  When tragedy strikes her family, she is sent to track down the person responsible.  In the process, she ends up meeting Day, and they develop a relationship with each other.

The trilogy deals with political corruption, deception, love, and war.   It deals with the problems caused by class disparities when the privileged aren’t aware of the plight of those that are less fortunate than them (while I was reading Never Stop Walking, I thought about this story and how there are people living lives similar to what Day had, except in reality, not fiction).  If I go into too much detail, I’ll give away spoilers, but there is a lot going on in this story; you’ll just have to read it until its exciting conclusion.

Characters

The story is told from Day and June’s points of view.  These two characters (as well as the supporting characters) make the story come alive.  Day is street smart and agile, able to climb buildings in a single bound (okay, that’s a little of an exaggeration).  He suffers from a few physical problems (courtesy of the government), and when his world intersects with June’s, the cultural differences can cause a few problems.  June is wealthy and wickedly smart.  She has an almost obsessive-compulsive fixation on time and minute details (which is why I can tell you when the story begins, even though the book never outright states it).  She’s a good fighter, and her attitude can sometimes get her into trouble.

The supporting characters are also great.  Tess, Day’s best friend, is a caring healer.  Metias, June’s older brother, teaches June not to judge people just by their life’s circumstances.  Thomas, Metias’s friend, is a soldier that is blindly loyal to the government.  Joining them is a whole host of other characters.

Themes

The Legend trilogy has many themes underlying the story, which is one of the things that makes it so enduringly lovely.  It speaks of sacrificing your own wishes because of your love for other people.  It speaks of not holding someone in judgement just because they’re not as well off as you.  It speaks about how blind loyalty to a cause can be dangerous.

I guess that one of the themes in this story can be summed up by these two lines of dialogue between June and another character:

“I will die with honor for sacrificing everything — everything — for my country.  And yet, Day is the legend, while I am to be executed.”

June’s response to his confusion about why Day, a criminal, was being held up as a good guy, and why the other character was being sentenced to death for following orders, was “Because Day chose to walk in the light.”

One Final Note

Legend has a very… complex… ending.  It’s not a story where the ending leaves you seeing flowers and rainbows and puppies and kittens, but it’s also not an ending that leaves you crying as you crawl into bed at 4 in the morning (yes, I’m still talking about you, chapter 50 of Allegiant!).  When I initially reviewed Champion on Goodreads, I gave it four stars.  I have since upgraded my review to five stars, because the ending grew on me a little (it helps that I write fanfiction in this fandom).  After reading the ending, I wanted more, which is why I chose to create more on my own.  I didn’t want to let the story go as it was.

If you like dystopian YA stories and haven’t read this one yet, you’ll want to read these.  All three of them.  I absolutely love this trilogy, and I think you will too.