Warcross by Marie Lu

** spoiler alert ** This book was VERY hard for me to rate. I love Marie Lu. Legend is an amazing trilogy I loved very much, I haven’t finished The Young elites trilogy yet (mostly because the first one gave me many feelings and I feel I need to reread to get proper impact for two and three) but I am pretty sure I will love the end of that series too. I like Marie Lu as a person as well! Her interviews are awesome and I love her social media presence.

Issues with the book: the beginning took me a while to rip my impressions away from Ready Player One. It is 100% not fair to say Warcross is Ready Player One esque, basically, they both are slightly in the future with a genius who invented badass virtual reality but everything else is massively different. It just took a little while for the inciting incident to happen and until Emi glitched in I was constantly pulled away from this story and into RPO. Once she glitched in I was slightly distracted by Wreck-It Ralph. But only because anytime someone says glitch that’s where my brain goes.

My real issue was that I guessed the twist super early. Like when Emi was at Hideo’s house early. I did not guess the whole twist. But a good bit of it.

Also, mind control felt like it needed to enter the book earlier for it to feel real to me. I had already been asked to make a lot of leaps because sci-fi and this felt slightly like one too many?

Also, did Emi have a bad quality? She is kind of the perfect human. Which is wonderful, I loved her so much. But I just am not sure if she was imperfect in any real way.

I also wanted a little bit more about class in this book. You don’t go from dirt poor to living the high life and not really think about waste and materialism and the seduction of opulence much. I know there were other things going on but this felt like a missed opportunity.

Now, this is not to say I didn’t LOVE parts of this book. Because I did LOVE a bunch of this book.

The games themselves were awesome to read about. I had a very similar feeling to when I read A Gathering of Shadows and The Final Empire (first for the games and second for the rules and family stuff). This is high praise obviously.

Lu has us a wonderfully diverse cast of characters. People from all over the world, so many different races and nationalities were represented. Pretty much every main character was a person of color, maybe one of them was white? It depends on what you count as main I guess. 2 characters with a lot of screen time are gay, 1 is in a wheelchair. People had very distinct personalities. I didn’t feel like I was reading about a world populated by a few character types, the characters really felt nuanced and like their lives were bigger than what I read.

I was totally tricked into not being suspicious right alongside Emi. Hideo confuses me at first but by the middle, I was 100% team BONE RIGHT NOW. Also as soon as Emi showered I was sure they were going to kiss. Lu clearly is very into personal hygiene. Which is great. Didn’t make me feel at all bad that my hair is very dirty right now. But I was gone for Hideo, every time something would skeeve me out a little I would get all swept up in his making dinner or whatever.

I am very very upset I didn’t wait to read this when book two was out. September seems stupidly far away. And I need to know WHYYY and HOWWW pretty badly. Also a little WHATTT. This book had me completely sucked in all day. I finished slightly after midnight but pretty much all day was spend reading Warcross of listening to Warcross on audio. It totally captured my mind.

I am so excited for Wildcard. Wild Card? Not sure. But I am pumped to read it. Ready to be saddd. Also for answers.

I hope there is a philosophy type stuff surrounding violence, I’m jazzed about that. And around resistance. I would love to get a good exploration of these things and book two seems very set up for that.

I gave this book 4 stars on Goodreads and read it on June 15th, 2018.