An imaginative and clever, if imperfect, tale that leaves a lot of room for Davroe to explore in future installments.
Davroe offers a YA sci-fi fantasy about a future society in the first of her Trickster series.
Ellani Drexel’s life is about to change, mostly for the better. Her father, Warren, is being celebrated for creating a wildly popular virtual-reality game. President Cyr, who owns the company, G-Corp, that powers the beautiful city of Evanescence, is giving Warren the Civil Enrichment Award, which will make his family part of the city’s elite. That’s the good part; the bad part is that since Ellani’s mother died, her father has kept a promise to make sure that his daughter stays a “Natural” even though most everyone she knows has multiple “mods” that make them look more pleasing. Poor folks outside the city walls, the Disfavored, can’t afford such mods, and the Evanescence Elite looks down on them. Still, Ellani has many suitors, including a broadcaster named Zane and Bastian, the adopted son of her Uncle Simon. Everything falls apart when Warren dies in a car crash that also takes Ellani’s legs. She’s imprisoned in her foster home and soon learns that everyone thinks she’s dead. She uses her father’s game to explore the outside world, as it gives her back her legs. In virtual reality, she finds out how powerful she can be—and how dangerous she can be to President Cyr. Davroe creates a fully realized world in Evanescence and its sister cities and gives it a compelling mythology. There’s a broad history and some philosophy in this “Post-America” and many small details that bring the main characters to life. The story raises some thought-provoking questions about what’s real and what’s not in a society in which people are hooked on changing themselves in the real world but still find virtual reality appealing. However, although Davroe offers some explanation for why Ellani doesn’t use the game to find a way to escape her foster home, it seems a bit thin. Also, the story doesn’t develop some of the secondary characters enough for readers to care what happens to them.
An imaginative and clever, if imperfect, tale that leaves a lot of room for Davroe to explore in future installments.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-63375-017-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Entangled Teen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A thrilling romance that could use more even pacing.
For the second time in her life, Leo must choose between her family and true love.
Nineteen-year-old Princess Leonie Kolburg’s royal family is bankrupt. In order to salvage the fortune they accrued before humans fled the frozen Earth 170 years ago, Leonie’s father is forcing her to participate in the Valg Season, an elaborate set of matchmaking events held to facilitate the marriages of rich and royal teens. Leo grudgingly joins in even though she has other ideas: She’s invented a water filtration system that, if patented, could provide a steady income—that is if Leo’s calculating Aunt Freja, the Captain of the ship hosting the festivities, stops blocking her at every turn. Just as Leo is about to give up hope, her long-lost love, Elliot, suddenly appears onboard three years after Leo’s family forced her to break off their engagement. Donne (Brightly Burning, 2018) returns to space, this time examining the fascinatingly twisted world of the rich and famous. Leo and her peers are nuanced, deeply felt, and diverse in terms of sexuality but not race, which may be a function of the realities of wealth and power. The plot is fast paced although somewhat uneven: Most of the action resolves in the last quarter of the book, which makes the resolutions to drawn-out conflicts feel rushed.
A thrilling romance that could use more even pacing. (Science fiction. 16-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-328-94894-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Plenty of heat but not enough substance to keep the fire burning.
A romantically entangled stepbrother and stepsister in Los Angeles navigate their tumultuous history and take their relationship to new levels in this translated title by an Argentinian author.
Nick and Noah are madly in love: Their mutual attraction is established as the book opens with Noah’s 18th birthday party, during which she and Nick have an explicitly described sexual encounter behind the pool house. This fiery scene sets the stage for twists and turns in the lovers’ journey, including a separation when Noah is forced to go on a monthlong mother-daughter European tour. But reminders of their pasts (chronicled in the 2023 series opener, My Fault) threaten to undermine their stability. Nick’s wealthy estranged mother makes an unfortunate appearance, while Noah is haunted by the trauma of her father’s violent death. The blend of everyday complications (jealousy, parental disapproval) with frothy visions of high-society life is at once lacking in subtlety and intimately irresistible. The series initially gained popularity on Wattpad, and the novel follows the episodic structure typical of works on that site; sensual encounters occur at reliable intervals. Still, the characters and their milieu feel formulaic, and the writing is stilted. The differences between the two—Nick is five years older and has an office job; Noah has just finished high school—makes their suffocatingly possessive relationship feel particularly squirm-worthy. Nick and Noah and their families read white.
Plenty of heat but not enough substance to keep the fire burning. (Romance. 16-18)Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781728290768
Page Count: 450
Publisher: Bloom Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
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