Erin Bow's The Scorpion Rules
I accidentally read a sci-fi-ish book and I LOVED IT. OH GOD, HOW I LOVED IT. The premise here is that it's several hundred years in the future, after the polar ice caps have melted and a bunch of wars have been waged over water, so an AI from the UN was like "eff it" and bombed a bunch of cities and TOOK OVER EVERYTHING. Now world leaders have to send their kids off to be hostages--and if they get involved in a war, their kid DIES. Our protagonist, Greta, a princess from Halifax, has grown up as a hostage and not really thought much of it--at least until a cute boy who doesn't understand the rules becomes a new hostage, and war between their countries seems to be looming. (This boy is kind of a dud, and is really the only weak spot in the book for me, even though he is Jewish, which I appreciated. I did like that Greta seems to be canonically bisexual, though.) I also kind of loved all the mentions of my hometown Pittsburgh, even though most of them are offhanded threats to blow it up. Anyway! This was great, and went in a lot of unexpected directions. I was a pretty big fan of Bow's first two books, but this was a pretty interesting leap forward, and I can't wait to see what she does with this world next (apparently a companion novel is in the works). A/A-.
__
A review copy was provided by the publisher. This book will be released in September.
No comments:
Post a Comment