Every locked door has a key. Every problem has a solution
Wow!! I just finished reading WarCross by Marie Lu, and oh my gosh it really took me by surprised. I’ve read a couple of her other books, mainly the Legend series, but I was still wary going into this one. I think it was because it deals a lot with science fiction, and sometimes that can be a bit dense in my experience, but it was super easy to fall into this book.
I must admit, I was reading this book for longer than I had planned. That was probably my fault as I kind of fell out of the reading mood for a little bit just cause I was so tired from work. I was stuck somewhere between pages 40-50 for about a week, only picking it up when I had seconds to spare and not reading often. But this past weekend I pushed myself to read and kept going and I’m so happy I did. Once you get into the book, everything gets knocked up a level. Whenever my friends have asked me about the book, all I can say is that it’s wild (haha get it, it’s wild like a wild card) - you’ll get my dumb joke if you’ve read the book.
I'm going to attempt to describe this book as briefly and coherently as possible, so bear with me. This universe is one that relies heavily on the influence of technology, specifically a device known as the Neuro-Link, which is basically a pair of glasses that once on submerges the wearer in virtual reality. In this universe a game known as WarCross is ridiculously popular, everyone plays it. This story follows a young woman named Emika Chen, and when the story starts she is working on completing a bounty hunt, that’s her job (I know super badass), and she’s trying to avoid being evicted from her apartment. Emika is a special girl - she’s incredible at hacking, but because of a crime committed when she was a kid, no-one will give her a job involving tech. Everything about her is off the grid, most of her stuff is old, used, and probably hacked. After a stunt she pulls, to make some money, she ends up on the radar of the creator of both the Neuro-Link and WarCross game, Hideo Tanaka, who asks her to work for him. I think that’s about as much information I can give before I start to reveal anything about the story, but believe me it takes so many turns and is definitely worth the read.
What I really appreciated about Marie Lu’s writing is that she made it easy to follow this story, one that’s heavily incorporating technology, without feeling dumb or overwhelmed with terminology. I mean the book centers around this brain interface and a video game that relies on it, she had to create and explain a game which has several moving parts in a way that wouldn’t lose her readers along the way. She artfully constructed this world, where people live completely different lives than we do, while simultaneously building the virtual reality which seamlessly overlaps it. Their world and what they were seeing was described so beautifully, she effectively painted quite the picture.
I wanted to quickly touch on the romance elements in this book ~ don’t read past this area if you haven’t read the book yet ~ I found the love involved to be perfectly placed and timed, and not something that felt forced. Maybe it’s because I’m a hopeless romantic but every interaction between Hideo and Emika made me wanna keep reading, and their intimate scenes together were delivered flawlessly. As one of my friends would say, the romance was A+
As you can probably tell I really enjoyed this book, I’m super excited to read the next one. I just have to knock another books off my list before I pick that one up. It ended with a cliffhanger of sorts, but mostly it was the anticipation of “how’re the characters going to get out of this, while still maintaining their relationships??” and boy I can’t wait to find out how the story continues.
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