All posts tagged Marie Lu

I Love The Young Elites

By Brookelorren on 2 Comments

Young Elites coverToday I will be reviewing the Young Elites trilogy, so it looks like I will be reviewing all nine of Marie Lu’s books this year.  My review for Wildcard will come out September 18th or 19th, and I’ll probably end up reviewing her Batman: Nightwalker book in September as well.  Like my review of the Legend trilogy last month, I will review all three books at once.

The Young Elites trilogy is comprised of three books:  The Young Elites, The Rose Society, and The Midnight Star.  I like the second two books better than the first book of the trilogy; in fact, I currently have two Young Elites related fanfics in progress, and they are more influenced by the second two books.

The three books follow the story of Adelina Amouteru.  As a child, she caught the blood fever and one of her eyes become infected and had to be burned out, leaving a scar.  She also was marked with silver hair.  Although she was still pretty, her scar left her marked: she was a malfetto.

Many people who caught the blood fever as children survived with marks of various types and lived as malfettos.  People hated and feared them.  Adults who caught the blood fever died.

Some children who got the blood fever eventually discovered that they had supernatural powers.  These people became known as The Young Elites.

The blood fever also infected her sister Violetta, who survived and remained unmarked.  Violetta remained pretty, and was the favorite of their father.  Over time, Adelina became resentful and bitter towards her sister.

Until one night, her father decided to sell her to a wealthy merchant… as a mistress.

Adelina wasn’t having that.  She decided to escape instead.  In the process of escaping, she accidentally killed her father — and discovered that she had the power to conjure up illusions.  She was an Elite.

She is taken in by a group of Elites known as The Dagger Society.  They taught her how to use her powers.  She falls in love with the leader of The Dagger Society.  While all this was happening, she discovers that she is trapped into making impossible choices.  She doesn’t know who to trust, and we are led along through all three books.

Themes

Trust and rejection are a huge part of this story.  Adelina feels like she is rejected by everybody in her life.  Society rejects her for being a malfetto.  She’s rejected by her father.  She feels like she is rejected by her sister.  Then, she is rejected some more.  The more she faces rejection, the more bitter and dark her soul becomes.  When she achieves power over others, she takes it out on them.  She becomes one of those wicked people that you read about as the villains in many other stories.  Yet… you don’t wish ill for her.

Another theme in this story seems to be about mental illness.  As Adelina becomes more powerful, she starts seeing hallucinations and has nightmares.  If she existed in the 21st century and not in a fantasy novel, we would say that she had a mental illness.  Her hallucinations only contribute to the darkness in her heart, until it almost seems impossible for her to crawl out of this dark hole that she’s dug for herself.  My theory on this trilogy is… that she would never have been able to crawl out of this hole on her own.

But, never fear, that is not the end of her story.  A third theme of this story is unconditional love.  There are people that love Adelina for who she is and not what she can do for them.  These are the people that finally help her redeem herself in the bittersweet end.

Setting

I love the setting for this book.  The world is a fantasy, medieval-type world (quite unlike Legend, which is a future dystopian setting).  Each part of the world has a different flavor to it.  The world that Adelina is born into seems to have the flavor of Italy, and in particular, Venice.  The northern part of the world reminds me of the Celts.  In the South, where Adelina’s ancestors hail from, the world seems like medieval Persia.

I felt that this was a really clever way to set up the world.  In my Young Elites WIP, Saving Adelinetta, I’ll be extending on the theme of her settings; but I still have about 1/3 of the first draft to do, and it’s going to need a lot of editing, so who knows when I will finish it.

Overall

This is one of my favorite stories.  In order to write fanfiction, I have to spend a lot of time reading the original books, getting into the character’s heads, and studying what the story is trying to say.  I’ve only written for four fandoms, and this is one of them.  The Young Elites trilogy is good enough for me to want to live in these character’s heads and reread the books enough to write fanfics based on it.  I think that’s enough of an endorsement to say that I really like it.

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.

Warcross: The Best Book I Read in 2017

By Brookelorren on 22 Comments

Warcross coverIt isn’t often that you can say that a book was the best book you read that year.  In fact, you can only say that about one book a year.  Warcross, by Marie Lu was the best book that I read in 2017.

The whole premise of Warcross, for me, was exciting.  A book about gaming and hacking and tracking down criminals?  Yes, please!  I already knew that Marie Lu could write in more than one genre and make them good: j’adore the dystopian world of 100 years from now in Legend (words in English can’t even express how much I love it, so I have to switch to French 😉 ), and the medieval fantasy world of The Young Elites was amazing too.  A book about a hacking bounty hunter should be great as well, right?

I was not disappointed.  Warcross kept me enthralled from the first chapter until the end.  Then I wanted more.

The main character, Emika Chen, is an amazingly complex character, like so many of the other characters that Lu has created.  Emika is brilliant, but she can’t use her genius to create a comfortable life for herself because she has a criminal record.  Before you go on judging her for that, you have to read the book, because there’s a really good reason for it.  Her past has been difficult, really for no fault of her own, and you just want to root for her and wish for her best.

In this world, everybody likes to play a game called Warcross.  It’s not only a virtual world where you can hang out and chill, it’s also a world where you can join a team and battle against other teams.  Like the real-world game of Overwatch (which my daughter likes to play) there are professional teams that people will root for; only in this book, Warcross is way more popular than Overwatch.  Everybody is involved.  Warcross is so integrated in society that your level in Warcross can determine whether you can get into fancy restaurants (much like the real-life social scoring program, Zhima Credit, can get you perks in China).

In this world, Emika is on the verge of homelessness.  In a moment of desperation, she initiates a hack that will change her life forever.

As she tries to hack into the International Warcross Championships, she accidentally is seen by nearly everybody in the world.  Whoops.

She thinks she’s in trouble.  The creator of Warcross, Hideo Tanaka (whom Emika has been fangirling after for years), gives her a call.  He wants her to come to Tokyo.  This creates one of the best lines in the book:

“I’d love to, but my roommate and I are actually about to get evicted from our apartment tomorrow, so…”

A billionaire that you’ve been fangirling over for years wants to meet you in Tokyo and that’s your reaction?  It seems like something I would say.  In fact, once when I was in Jack in the Box, my boyfriend said to me “let’s go get married” and my response was “I thought we were going to go buy a computer today.”  We ended up getting married, and never did go buy that computer, LOL.

Instead of getting in trouble, Emika gets a job.  She goes on adventures.  Finds danger.  Maybe finds love.  You’ll just have to read it to find out.

This book almost feels like it could happen in the next five or ten years.  Even today, there is a Dark Web.  There is an assassination market.  Artificial intelligence and virtual reality are already here, and they are getting better every day.  The world of Warcross is one that has all of these elements, which are already here, and are only getting more prevalent in our lives every day.

In addition to being a great book, Warcross asks ethical questions, although not overtly.  Is giving up freedom for security worth it?  Who determines right from wrong?  Should we let the powers that be keep us from doing what “they” think is wrong?  It’s not just a fun book, it’s a fun book that makes you think.

I don’t think I can say enough good things about this book.  If you haven’t read Warcross, get it now; and while you’re at it, pre-order Wildcard, which comes out September 18th.  While I can’t say that Wildcard will be the best book I read in 2018 (I haven’t read it yet, and there’s still 6 months left in the year), I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a great book as well.