In Legend, America has been divided into two: the Republic on the west coast and the Colonies on the east. They’re at war with each other and no one remembers that the country used to be whole. A terrible plague grips the Republic. The poor suffer most from it, since they are unable to afford the vaccine. Living in this world are our two fifteen year old protagonists: Day, a male fugitive from the law who’s become notorious for several carefully-planned crimes; and June, a female prodigy who has been trained as a Republic soldier. When June’s brother is murdered, ostensibly by Day, the Republic sends her to hunt him down. And there is our story, told in alternating chapters from Day’s and June’s perspectives.

I appreciated Lu’s honesty with her depictions of June’s participation in the violence, which is a major part of the novel. June has been raised in a culture that sanctions torture and is at perpetual war with the Colonies. She’s been singled out by the leaders of this culture, been molded by them into their perfect soldier, a soldier that will do anything for the Republic. Yes, she has qualms, and yes, she refrains from the worst of what her superiors do, but she is a participant in the violent process. In one scene, she watches a fellow soldier torture a Colonies spy in order to learn how it’s done – after all, she will have to do it herself one day. I’m glad Lu didn’t flinch from showing us this. It’s realistic and creates a compelling character arc for June.

The first thing I noticed about Legend was its typefaces: gold sans serif font for Day and black serif font for June. As a teen, I would probably have loved this. As an adult, I wasn’t as thrilled. The gold is a bit too light for comfortable reading and I always prefer serif fonts on a printed page.

It seems like the color/font switches were used to compensate for a weakness in voice differentiation. When a story is told from more than one first-person perspective, there’s always the possibility that the voices will be too similar to one another. In fact, in writing this review, I had to go back to the book to look up which character was in the gold font and which character in the black.

I would have liked to see more backstory. This is a complaint I have with a lot of dystopias that are intended to be series. Lu sets up a pretty interesting premise with the Republic versus the Colonies, but we never learn why the schism occurred. Really, that’s half the fun of a dystopia – learning what terrible thing (or things!) it was that caused humanity to be in such a sad spot. Often this is revealed in second or third books, but I always feel its lack in the first. It causes the world to feel underdeveloped, and world-building is so important in science fiction. (The Hunger Games actually never revealed this information, and it’s something I’ve had to make my peace with.)

Here I am sounding like a broken record, but I think Legend should have been written in past tense. There’s a lot of action, but it’s not a straight up action novel (there’s a lot of wallowing in prison cells, for instance), and the present tense feels forced.

With all of these criticisms, you may think I didn’t enjoy Legend, but I did, and quite a bit. It’s a good read and one I’d recommend to dystopia fans. Divergent does both action and voice a little better, but both books have the same feel (lots of action, a small but tough female protagonist, several physical tests that must be overcome, big government secrets). To its credit, Legend wraps itself up in a single volume, which I always appreciate. This is not to say there isn’t a sequel (the website for the book is “legendtheseries.com” after all), and I’ll be happy to read it once its published.

If you’ve been following me at STACKED for any amount of time, you know how much I love dystopias. Even the ones that I know will be terrible, I gobble up. Even when they’re written in first person present tense and don’t appear to offer anything new, I will read them.

The two books I talk about briefly here are a far cry from terrible. I went into them thinking I would enjoy them a great deal, and I did, but they fell short of my (admittedly lofty) expectations. I’ll probably read the sequels, but they didn’t blow me away like I wanted them to. Sometimes when a book is within a genre I love, it’s more disappointing that it’s not spectacular than when it’s in a genre I don’t love, if that makes sense. Kelly has actually reviewed both of these books before, and I encourage you to hop on over and read her reviews if you haven’t already.

Bumped by Megan McCafferty

There are so many funny things about Bumped. I think people who outright dislike it take it much too seriously. In a way, I don’t blame them. Most dystopias are so grim they can make the reader depressed, and they’re generally short on laughs. So when that’s what you expect going in to a book, it can be hard to shake it. Luckily, Kelly told me beforehand it was a dystopian satire, although I like to think I would have figured it out on my own soon enough. It’s refreshing to be able to poke fun at a genre you enjoy while still appreciating the aspects that make that genre so alluring in the first place.

My main problem with Bumped was the ending. It suffers from series-itis: there’s no real resolution and it leaves the reader wanting more (and not in a good way). A lot of good dystopias leave big, important questions unanswered at the end of the first book, but they’re good because they still have some sort of climax, falling action, and resolution, however wimpy the resolution may be. With Bumped, I felt like McCafferty just took a pair of scissors and lopped off the book at a random section. It wasn’t satisfying, and I was disappointed after it brought me so many chuckles.

Blood Red Road by Moira Young

Blood Red Road has two primary strengths: voice and setting. It’s narrated by illiterate protagonist Saba, and therefore uses no quotation marks and only a smattering of other punctuation marks. (She does use periods. If she did not, I would have put it down after the first page. Or probably before that.) It’s heavy on dialect and slang. Saba’s very imperfect narration provides good insight into Saba’s very imperfect character. She’s tough but frequently heartless. This was actually what I enjoyed most about Saba. Saba’s younger sister is the main ancillary character, and Saba is pretty upfront with the reader about how she resents her and doesn’t love her like she does her twin brother. It seems harsh, but it also shoots to pieces all those comparisons with Katniss (and those comparisons are legion).

The other strength is the setting. Saba lives in the Dustlands, and the more you read about it, the more parched you feel. It’s a place full of sand and blood and sand and trash heaps and more sand. This is a pretty terrible place to live in, and there’s no magical place where it doesn’t suck.

So, we’ve got great voice and great setting. Where were my expectations not met? The action. Blood Red Road is fast-paced and intense, but it was pretty predictable. I knew Saba would be captured, I knew how her fights would go in the cage matches, I knew how she would…well, to say any more would be spoiling it, but if you’ve read any dystopias (or any action novels, really), it wouldn’t be much of a spoiler. It became kind of a game to see how many of my predictions came true (all of them). I need my books to surprise me, and this one didn’t do it much.

Alex’s life is kind of terrible. Her parents are dead and she has an inoperable brain tumor she calls the Monster. She’s run away from her aunt’s house, where she’s been living, to spend some time hiking and camping in the wilderness. She plans to eventually make it up to Lake Superior where she’ll sprinkle her parents’ ashes. Then a massive electromagnetic pulse hits, knocking out almost all electricity, killing most people, and turning everyone else – except a few – into zombies. Alex is one of the few who survives without turning zombie, as is Ellie, a bratty eight year old girl who was hiking under duress with her (now dead) grandfather.

The first section of the book is an extended action sequence wherein Alex must use all of her wits to survive in the newly zombified world. She’s stuck in the wilderness with no car, no electricity, plenty of zombies, and an annoying and unhelpful little girl in tow, but she does pretty well for herself (something I really appreciated – Alex is incredibly smart and capable). When she meets up with Tom, a young military man, they have an even better chance of survival. This first section, which takes up a little more than half the book, is full of action and page-turning suspense. I’m normally not one for a story that is almost non-stop action, but Bick writes it very well.

Then things go downhill very fast (as if the zombie apocalypse weren’t bad enough already), and Alex finds herself taking sanctuary in the city of Rule – without her two companions. There are some seriously creepy things going on in Rule that aren’t apparent at first. These creepy things involve the council of five men that rule Rule, why the young girls who are taken in by Rule are called the “Chosen,” and what the city of Rule’s relationship really is with the zombies they keep at bay.

I’ve seen a lot of negative feedback toward this second part, but I actually liked it just as much as the first. The dynamics between the different inhabitants of Rule are fascinating, and watching Alex assess the situation and attempt to make conclusions about what she experiences is equally fascinating. Plus, I love reading about sinister societies whose secrets are slowly revealed over time.

It’s got a lot of elements in common with the Chaos Walking series: the end of the world/human civilization, a frenetically paced first section, the protagonist’s affinity with a dog/dogs, and a creepy post-apocalyptic society masquerading as a good society that has some serious problems with women. It’s not terrible that Ashes has so much in common with those books, but because of my deep and unending love for them, Ashes inevitably pales in comparison – and comparisons are unavoidable here.

Still, that makes it a good readalike for people who enjoyed Chaos Walking. It’s also a bit more straightforwardly-told, so readers who disliked Todd’s somewhat disjointed narration needn’t worry about that in Ashes. In a subgenre so full of mediocre offerings, Ashes is a very good one. It’s even written in – gasp – third person past tense! No wonder I liked it so much.

Review copy received from the publisher. Ashes is available now.

I loved Mary E. Pearson’s The Adoration of Jenna Fox. In fact, it’s what got me through a reading slump back in 2009 and sucked me even deeper into the world of YA. So naturally, when I discovered there was a sequel, I was all over it. If you haven’t read The Adoration of Jenna Fox and you’d like to at some point, I recommend not reading my review – there are spoilers.

The Fox Inheritance is actually not about Jenna Fox, primarily. Instead, it tells the story of the two friends that were in the car accident with Jenna – Locke and Kara. Even though Jenna destroyed the machines that housed Locke’s and Kara’s minds, she didn’t realize there were copies. Now it’s 260 years later, and those copies have been brought out of their suspended existence and given brand-new, BioPerfect bodies.

Locke and Kara are brought back to life by Doctor Gatsbro, who keeps them at his estate and provides for all of their needs. Locke and Kara’s very existence is illegal, since none of their original bodies survived the crash, meaning they don’t meet the “Jenna standard” of ten percent. That doesn’t stop Doctor Gatsbro from inviting investors over to take a look at the two friends – investors who hope to one day have their own brains uploaded and stored while a new body is created to replace the old, worn-out one.

Once Locke and Kara realize they are merely shelf models for Gatsbro’s illegal money-making venture (and that he will never let them go and make lives of their own), they decide to make a run for it. That’s where the story really begins. Locke and Kara must learn to navigate this new world that they know nothing about and deal with the emotional turmoil that accompanies their existence. Naturally, they decide to find Jenna.

The story is told entirely from Locke’s point of view in a taut, fast-paced first person present tense. I complain constantly about how sick I am of first person present tense, but Pearson used it well in Adoration and she does so again here. The pace is fast and the surprises are many, just how I like my dystopias.

In Adoration, Pearson created a future world more advanced than our own, but not entirely different. In The Fox Inheritance, she’s hurtled us much further into the future and let her imagination run with it. In future America, there are two Americas split not on physical lines, but ideological lines, and those who don’t commit to one or the other are outcast. (Texas is also its own country, and while I find it amusing that so many science fiction and fantasy writers decide to do this, I also don’t want to give people here any more ammunition, so can we please place a moratorium on this for awhile?)

There are also robots (“bots”) all over the place that are used to help humans with a variety of everyday operations – driving cabs, shining shoes, serving food, and so on. The bots are so advanced that they seem human, but they’re tightly regulated. Dot, the bot who drives the cab Locke and Kara escape with, isn’t even built with a lower body since it’s not deemed necessary for her function. Naturally, many of these bots seem human in many respects and yearn to be free.

There are also a ton of other little details that make the world seem truly futuristic, like the freeways that automatically direct the cars and the communicator built into each person’s palm. I loved all of these details, even if I felt that not all of them worked completely (the strange split in the country is particularly weak).

There’s a lot more that Pearson does well here. She gives the reader a good sense of the horror Locke and Kara must have felt trapped in limbo for 260 years. Jenna 260 years later is realistically adult and wise, though her body looks as young as ever. And Locke’s and Kara’s anger and confusion and grief over their situation are heart-wrenching.

Sometimes Pearson’s plotting is predictable, but it’s always exciting and well-written. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this to fans of the first book and dystopias in general. It’s a fast, fun read that also makes you think a little – what more can you ask for?

Review copy received from the publisher. The Fox Inheritance is on shelves now.