Review: Warcross by Marie Lu
One of the buzziest books of the year, Warcross has been high on my list of must-reads. About bounty hunter and hacker Emika Chen, Warcross follows Emika to Tokyo, where she’s entered into the highly-anticipated Warcross Championships to find and stop a hacker threatening the games. Part Hunger Games part Matrix, it’s a hell of a good time.
The world of Warcross is engaging and interesting, and easily tops my list of fictional worlds I’d love to live in for awhile. Marie Lu is an excellent — excellent — storyteller, and she built a world that will make readers curious and eager to inhabit, and Warcross is fast-paced and engaging. It feels fun and curious to live in a world where you can proceed on a points system, being rewarded with points for visiting a new place or trying something new, your status in its tech-heavy world growing each time you level up.
That alone will ensure I read the next book in the series, but as much as I love Lu’s ability to put a world together or make something engaging and interesting, I can’t get into her first-person narration. It’s familiar from earlier novels — the Legend and Young Elites trilogies — both of which featured the same clunky and repetitive passages and cardboard prose. At times a character will tell Emika “something is happening” and Emika will then thinks, to herself and to us, “something is happening” as if I didn’t already read that a line ago. It creates a bit of distance between us and Emika, and it happens often enough that it was impossible to ignore.
It’s part of why I don’t have very strong feelings about Emika, who’s a perfectly fine protagonist. She’s strong-willed and smart, and I like her, but I don’t leave the book feeling like I want to spend more time with her. In short, I could take her or leave her, but she doesn’t seem as central to the story as she should. Rather, I feel like Emika could hop into any other story and behave the same way.
The same goes for the rest of the characters. Like Emika’s teammates and friends and Hideo Tanaka, Warcross founder and her love interest. Emika and Hideo’s bond is too instalove to really rally behind it, though they share a few steamy moments that are enjoyable. There’s so little conflict between them that I was left feeling a bit bored, (aside from a longheld admiration on Emika’s end, I’m not sure why either of them are so enamored with the other), but this may be saved by a pretty big obstacle thrown into their path that’ll be resolved in later books.
And those later books are very, very necessary. Though I’m a series girl, I like it when my books can standalone somewhat, but Warcross isn’t that. The ending feels a little too abrupt, and the book-ending twists are decent but not exactly unpredictable. If you’ve managed to connect with Emika, Hideo, and Emika and Hideo, they’re emotionally impactful, but I couldn’t get there.
Rating: 3/5 Stars
