Book Review: Young Adult: Dead Zone by Robison Wells

The invasion has begun—and a group of teens are caught in the crossfire.
I volunteered to be a spy, not an assassin.
I know this is war . . .
but I just want to do what’s right.
If you ask me, none of us should be here—but no one gave me a choice.
And I won’t blindly follow orders.
I am essential to the plan.
And I will be a hero for my country.
If I were normal, I wouldn’t be
old enough to join the army.
But I’m not normal. I’m a weapon.
We’re a perfect match—
on and off the battlefield.
I hope that means we’ll both survive.

Title: Dead Zone
Author: Robison Wells
Category: Young Adult
Genre: Science Fiction Thriller/Action Adventure
Publisher: Harper Teen
Publication Date: September 30, 2014
Format: Paperback ARC
Length: 373 pages
ISBN-10: 0062275046
ISBN-13: 9780062275042

Series or Standalone: Blackout #2

Literary Awards:
N/A

Themes: Following Orders, Greater Good
POV: Multiple 3rd person
Tense: Past

Reviewer: Nick

Where I Got It: Thanks to Atsiko for finding a trove of 2014 ARCs. We’ve both spent time listening to Brandon Sanderson’s Podcast, Writing Excuses, on which Wells was often a guest, so we were very excited to have someone reviewing this book. For scheduling reasons, that someone ended up being me.

Review:

This was a difficult review to write. I knew about a third of the way through this would not be a favorite of mine. I like the premise. Superpowers, especially limited and diverse superpowers, are inherently a fun idea for me. But, because I enjoy the idea so much, I might be more inclined to a tough rubric. There have been several well-known books/multi-media franchises based on the concept of large numbers of people with starkly varying super-powers. X-Men is probably the most famous. The TV show Heroes also achieved a good deal of success with this premise. Going further afield, there have been several anime and manga series using a similar idea: Gakuen Alice, and more recently Tokyo ESP. None of these stories are perfect. And neither is Dead Zone.

One of the major issues I had with the book was the characters. They were, to my mind, very cliche representations of teenagers. The character voices and their behavior didn’t feel natural to me in many scenes of the book. The supporting characters were more complex than the main characters, while being more cliche stereotypes. The main characters, while less cliche, were also much less complex, and I had trouble buying some of their emotional quandaries. You’re going to have a certain amount of apparent cliche in any YA book, just because your average teenager has fairly similar experiences to their peers, and also because of media stereotypes popularized by well-known television shows and movies. It can be very hard to break out of those narratives, especially for older authors who may be more distant from their teenage selves.

The plot of Dead Zone was also a fairly standard war plot. I felt like I saw quite a few of the plot twists coming. They followed a common pattern.

To be fair to Wells, I can definitely see why a publisher picked this up. It’s got that high concept and breakneck pace that makes thrillers so popular. The problem-solving ability of the main characters was great fun to see in action, and he created that sense of righteous indignation at the way the characters were co-opted by various groups that can lead to a strong emotional investment even in weakly-drawn characters.

I haven’t read Variant, or any of the books in that series, so I can’t say how Dead Zone stacks up. It is an improvement on Blackout, so readers who enjoyed the first book in the series will likely enjoy this one. I personally wouldn’t have bought this book after reading Blackout. I don’t mind the few hours it took to read it, but I think I would have minded the money I’d have had to spend to buy it.

Conclusion: 66/100 (Readable, but not compulsively so)
Premise: 6/10 (Done before, sometimes better)
Plot: 7/10 (Cliche)
Setting: 7/10 (Decently-drawn)
Main Character: 7/10 (Nothing special, but nothing terrible)
SF Elements 6/10 (Cliche)
Mutant powers 7/10 (Cliche, but well-used)
Supporting Characters: 7/10 (Cliche)
Writing: 3/15 (Competent, but no more)
Voice: 2/5 (Not great)
Themes: 7/10 (Common and mediocre execution)
Resolution: 7/10 (Cliche)

Buy Or Borrow: Worth buying if you like super hero stories, otherwise borrowing might be the best option.

Similar Books:
Very similar to the X-Men franchise and also the TV show Heroes. Your standard kids with superheroes story.

Other Reviews:
GoodReads
Kirkus Reviews
YA Books Central
This Blonde Reads
San Francisco Book Review

Buy Links:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound

E-Books:
iBooks
Kindle UK
Kindle US
Kobo
Google Play
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Book Review: Young Adult: Love is the Drug by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Emily Bird was raised not to ask questions. She has perfect hair, the perfect boyfriend, and a perfect Ivy-League future. But a chance meeting with Roosevelt David, a homeland security agent, at a party for Washington DC’s elite leads to Bird waking up in a hospital, days later, with no memory of the end of the night.

Meanwhile, the world has fallen apart: A deadly flu virus is sweeping the nation, forcing quarantines, curfews, even martial law. And Roosevelt is certain that Bird knows something. Something about the virus–something about her parents’ top secret scientific work–something she shouldn’t know.

The only one Bird can trust is Coffee, a quiet, outsider genius who deals drugs to their classmates and is a firm believer in conspiracy theories. And he believes in Bird. But as Bird and Coffee dig deeper into what really happened that night, Bird finds that she might know more than she remembers. And what she knows could unleash the biggest government scandal in US history.

Title: Love is the Drug
Author: Alaya Dawn Johnson
Category: Young Adult
Genre: Thriller
Publisher: Scholastic
Publication Date: September 30, 2014
Format: DRC from Netgalley
Length: 355 pages
ISBN-10: 0545417813
ISBN-13: 0545417813

Series or Standalone: Standalone

Literary Awards:
N/A

Themes: Family, Trust, Epidemics, Bioterrorism
POV: 3rd person
Tense: Present

Reviewer: Marisa

Where I Got It: Nick scored the DRC from NetGalley. I’m glad to find something in the thriller genre that doesn’t also touch on dystopia. Not that I dislike dystopia, but it’s nice to have a break now and again.

Cover Notes: Simple, but effective. It does follow the thriller dystopian trend of having a basic color and a symbol, but I would totally pick this up in a bookstore.

Soundtrack: I found my X-Files soundtrack perfect for this one.

Review:

This is a difficult book to review. It had many elements that I loved in isolation. The main character is a well-off black girl living in DC. There are shady operatives everywhere, and the plot is based on biology and epidemiology. The main character is coming to a realization that not everything is the way she thought it was, and that “perfect” is an illusion. I love all these things in a book, especially a YA book. But!

This book is smack-dab in the thriller genre, and so is basically every single trope, convention, and character archetype. There’s basically nothing seasoned thriller fans haven’t seen before. Seasoned romance readers will also be quite familiar with the way this book goes. For the most part, the pace was fast enough that I did’t stop to think about these things too hard, but when I did, the cracks showed pretty clearly. I’m sure many readers will say it’s just a consequence of the genre. For that reason, didn’t mark the book down in those areas as much as I might have otherwise.

Another issue I had with the book was the love interest. Coffee is a drug dealer. We first meet him snorting coke in the basement at a party. He seems like a nice dude. He claims drugs to him, especially his own personal formulas, are mind-expanders in his pursuit of enlightenment. But I dislike the fact that the cynic whistle-blower in these sort of books is always a criminal of soe sort. He also takes the role of the magical poor person, because of course all the rich folks are clueless or corrupt, and can’t see past their selfish goals. It’s quite a “teenage rebellion” cliche with all the tropes, including the “perfect”, popular boyfriend who’s going places, that everyone knows the MC would be perfect with, pitted against the bad boy loner with a few good friends who’s so “real”, and “bad” for her supposed goals. Again, this could just be my personal preference. Plenty of books with similar romance plots have sold very well, so I didn’t mark the book down too much for this.

The plot itself is quite tight, and has few holes. It’s no particularly creative, but the writer has a great sense of pacing, and you’ll keep turning the pages. You can see most of the twists coming, but at least they make sense for the most part. There were a few times when the book was confusing, such as when it would switch to first person seemingly randomly. I think it was a narrative device the author was trying out. I don’t think it worked too well.

The main character, Bird, has a good teenage voice. That’s an important aspect of a good YA novel, and Johnson has it nailed down. The fact that she is black comes across very clearly. I didn’t find myself falling into the default white MC trap. She responded mostly realistically to the various revelations, and she had that teenage flip-flopping/back-and-forth thing going on, especially in her romantic life. There was strong but realistic peer-pressure. She didn’t come across as whiny or immature. This was one of the more positive aspects of Johnson’s writing.

I found this book pretty average. I’m writing this review a few weeks after finishing the book, and I had to remind myself of a few things. But I would definitely pick up another book by this author, assuming the back cover sounded good.

Conclusion: 74/100 (Mildly entertaining, but not fantastic)
Premise: 6/10 (Standard thriller premise)
Plot: 8/10 (Well-constructed but not very original)
Setting: 7/10 (Could have been anywhere, really)
Main Character: 8/10 (Good concept, decent execution)
Romance sub-plot: 6/10 (Cliche, but decently written)
Love Interest: 7/10 (Not a fan of the noble badboy trope)
Supporting Characters: 7/10 (Standard thriller cliches)
Writing: 4/5 (Not bad enough to make me stumble)
Voice: 4/5 (Good when not confusing)
Themes: 7/10 (Fairly cliche approach)
Resolution: 8/10 (Nice twist)

Buy Or Borrow: Definitely worth a buy, if you like thrillers or conspiracies

Similar Books:
There are a surprisingly small number of YA thrillers that don’t strongly overlap with another genre such as dystopia or speculative fiction. I might update this section as I run across more.

Other Reviews:
GoodReads
Publishers Weekly
Kirkus Reviews
Lit Up Review
Teen Librarian Toolbox
YA Books Central
Dreams in Tandem

Buy Links:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound

E-Books:
iBooks
Kindle UK Not currently available
Kindle US
Kobo
Google Play
nook

Book Review: Young Adult: Rites of Passage by Joy N. Hensley

Sam McKenna’s never turned down a dare. And she’s not going to start with the last one her brother gave her before he died.

So Sam joins the first-ever class of girls at the prestigious Denmark Military Academy. She’s expecting push-ups and long runs, rope climbing and mud-crawling. As a military brat, she can handle an obstacle course just as well as the boys. She’s even expecting the hostility she gets from some of the cadets who don’t think girls belong there. What she’s not expecting is her fiery attraction to her drill sergeant. But dating is strictly forbidden and Sam won’t risk her future, or the dare, on something so petty…no matter how much she wants him.

As Sam struggles to prove herself, she discovers that some of the boys don’t just want her gone—they will stop at nothing to drive her out. When their petty threats turn to brutal hazing, bleeding into every corner of her life, she realizes they are not acting alone. A decades-old secret society is alive and active… and determined to force her out.
At any cost.

Now time’s running short. Sam must decide who she can trust…and choosing the wrong person could have deadly consequences.

Title: Rites of Passage
Author: Joy N. Hensley
Category: Young Adult
Genre: Contemporary
Publisher: Harper Teen
Publication Date: September 9, 2014
Format: Paperback ARC
Length: 402 pages
ISBN-10: 0062295195
ISBN-13: 9780062295194

Series or Standalone: Standalone

Literary Awards:
N/A

Themes: Military, Family, Sexism
POV: First person
Tense: Present

Reviewer: Marisa

Where I Got It: Another paperback ARC from Atsiko. I was a bit reluctant to read this one, because it did’t seem like my usual type of book. I was wrong.

Review:

I’m glad I read this book. The main character was a true strong female character. No excessive whining, knew how to handle a challenge, and was almost never unfair to her friends. That’s not to say she was perfect, which I would have hated. She had her flaws, but I was rarely angry at her for them. Plus, she felt completely like a real teenage girl, and not a stereotype, or an exaggeration.

The supporting cast was also wonderful. One of the great things about having a single limited perspective is that you get to see the various facets of a character, and you can really get in the shoes of the perspective character. For example, Sam’s brother was an incredibly frustrating character for most of the book, and I could understand why Sam felt the exact same way. And Kelly, one of her main trio of cadet friends had a similar feel. I loved how Hensley dealt with the idea of a good person causing trouble and pain for those around them. There are other characters I loved who I don’t want to spoil for you, but there was another female character in the book whose original connection to Sam only made the relationship they later developed more awesome. I happen to consider myself a feminist. And that means that the way this relationship passed the Bechdel test with flying colors made me really happy.

The only supporting character I disliked as a character was the love interest. He was a very nice person, and quite supportive, but I found him a bit dull, and while the relationship was perfectly healthy, I just didn’t care for it. I would have liked it better if Sam had just stayed single for the book. Especially because of the emphasis made on cadets not dating. It seemed like there was plot pressure and authorial intrusion because, as several other reviews have called it, the relationship was “off-limits”. A good way to describe the relationship without spoilers is that it greatly resembles Beatrice’s relationship with Four in Roth’s Divergent. So I’m sure many readers will like it. Take my dislike with a grain of salt.

Finally, I disliked the melodramatic lengths the story went to at the end. I think it could have been dialed down a bit without losing any of the impact. I just got really, really tired of the frustration I felt for the last two thirds, and I think it was unnecessary for the obstacles to be as huge as they ended up being. If you’ve ever seen any other military school stories–another review mentioned Cadet Kelly with Hilary Duff–or stories about crossing the gender barrier, you won’t find anything unique or original in this book, but the quality of the execution is very good. Definitely worth a read.

Conclusion: 77/100 (Loved reading it. Quite a roller-coaster.)
Premise: 7/10 (Not the most original, but very well-executed)
Plot: 7/10 (Standard and a bit melodramatic at the end)
Setting: 8/10 (Very well-portrayed)
Main Character: 8/10 (Awesome)
Love Interest 7/10 (Fairly standard)
Romance Sub-plot 7/10 (Sweet, but seemed a bit forced)
Supporting Characters: 9/10 (Loved or hated most of them. A compliment either way)
Writing: 3/5 (Good, but not inspired.)
Voice: 4/5 (Spunky!)
Themes: 8/10 (Fit with the story and were well-executed)
Resolution: 9/10 (Loved it, but it wasn’t perfect)

Buy Or Borrow: I’d say this one is definitely worth buying.

Similar Books:
It’s fantasy, but Mercedes Lackey’s Talia novels have a similar vibe and structure.
Divergent by Veronica Roth, for reasons explained in the main review.

Other Reviews:
GoodReads
Kirkus Reviews
Publishers Weekly
Lit-Up Review
Alexa Loves Books
The Bookish Owl
Reading Lark

Buy Links:
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound

E-Books:
iBooks
Kindle UK
Kindle US
Kobo
Google Play
nook