The events of Fox Forever follow closely on the heels of The Fox Inheritance. Having accepted a Favor from the Network, the resistance group working to combat the corruption and rights infringements in the future world Locke has found himself in, Locke must now return the Favor – and it won’t be one of his choosing.

The Network sends him undercover into the home of a high-ranking government official, a man who has ties to a long-missing, presumed dead member of the Network (and not the pleasant, friendly kind of ties). His means of entry: the official’s seventeen year old daughter Raine. As Locke befriends Raine, and then begins to romance her, he discovers a web of secrets, lies, and conspiracies. 

This is my kind of book (I’m sure this surprises no one). Pearson has continued her series begun with The Adoration of Jenna Fox admirably, and this is a worthy conclusion. She’s succeeded partly because she’s kept Jenna’s story in the background for the sequels, allowing Locke’s story to be informed, but not ruled, by it. I find that this technique is successful for many authors (Marissa Meyer is a good example); it keeps the stories fresh while still giving the reader something of the familiar.

All of the elements that made the previous books so good are here too: fast pace, interesting world-building, complex thematic ideas about humanity and morality. But this is actually a much larger story than Inheritance, which mainly focused on Kara’s and Locke’s struggles to come to terms with their long imprisonment, subsequent release, and possible non-humanness. The final volume tackles these ideas, but it’s much more focused on the incipient revolution, which was ancillary in the second book. And the events that occur have far-reaching and long-lasting consequences for many, many people.

Some years ago, I had a conversation with someone who told me they rarely, if ever, read epilogues. I was so shocked at learning this, and even more shocked when I learned it was hardly a rare condition (and yes, not reading epilogues is a condition). Let me tell you all now, if you read this book, you must read its epilogue. Yes, the main events of the book are resolved without it, but the epilogue brings all three books together and provides a proper ending, a fitting and moving one. This may be a complete book without the epilogue, but the series is not a complete series without it.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Fox Forever will be published March 19.

A plane crashes in the middle of the ocean, and a sixteen year old girl is the only survivor. She could tell everyone what happened – if she remembered it. Not only does she not know how she ended up floating in the ocean, she can’t remember her family, her friends, or her own name. And she seems to have abilities that no one else does – like being able to understand and speak all languages without even knowing it.

Called Violet by the hospital staff due to the unusual color of her eyes, the girl also discovers that many of the everyday objects others can identify with ease – a television, a car – are foreign to her. And then a boy arrives, who claims he knows her – her name, her past, and the way to restore her memories. He tells her they were in love, and he tells her she is in danger.

Unremembered was a really odd read for me. It has so many elements that I generally love in a book (*SPOILERS* time travel, secrets, futuristic technology *END SPOILERS*), but it never felt as thrilling as it should have. 

I think most of that is due to the pretty pedestrian writing, which tells the story but doesn’t go much beyond that. For example, I knew that Violet was confused and didn’t recognize her surroundings, but I didn’t feel it. I contrast this with Tucker in The Obsidian Blade, who was presented with confusing event after confusing event and I felt that confusion right along with him.

While I didn’t necessarily guess the big twist in Unremembered, it didn’t exactly take me by surprise either. Which is a shame, because it featured a plot element I normally love (see above). I just couldn’t get behind it here. Other elements in the book felt a bit thin, too: characterization wasn’t as great as I wanted it to be, and the world-building in particular felt lacking. 

Unremembered feels very much like a book-of-the-moment. It reads like all the other light (very, very light) sci fi YA books out there now (like Erasing Time or Eve and Adam), doesn’t offer anything new, and doesn’t distinguish itself in any other aspect such as writing or world-building, where it could have redeemed itself. It’s not bad, but it’s not great, either. This is not to say it won’t find its fans among those who have read others of its ilk and simply want more of the same, but ultimately, Unremembered will go unremembered.

(Please accept my sincerest apologies for the pun. My fingers forced me to type it.)

Review copy provided by the publisher. Unremembered will be published March 5.

It’s no secret I adored Cinder. Pure science fiction that uses my favorite fairy tale as a springboard for something fresh and different? Yes please! I could only hope that the sequel would be just as good.

And it (nearly) is. Whew.

Like Cinder, Scarlet uses a well-known fairy tale (this time, Little Red Riding Hood) as inspiration for a new story. It’s fun to pick out details from the original story, but for the most part, Meyer’s story is her own (this is a good thing). 

Scarlet Benoit’s grandmother is missing, and Scarlet believes she’s been kidnapped. She runs into a streetfighter named Wolf (of course she does), and discovers he knows quite a bit about what happened to her grandmother. They team up and decide to search for Scarlet’s grandmother together. Naturally, Wolf isn’t being quite truthful (he just happened to run into Scarlet?), and the two get into all sorts of fun scrapes while developing massive crushes on each other.

While much of the story focuses on Scarlet, Meyer doesn’t leave Cinder, who has managed to escape from prison with the help of a very amusing new character, behind. The chapters alternate (roughly) between the two characters until they eventually meet up near the end of the book. 

Unsurprisingly, Scarlet’s story has quite a bit to do with Cinder’s, but the focus on Scarlet in this sequel keeps interest high. It adds another dimension to the story; it makes the story bigger and raises the stakes. Some mysteries are cleared up and others are introduced. We learn more about Queen Levana’s plan for Kai as well as Cinder’s childhood and how Scarlet and her grandmother are involved. I loved learning more about the world Meyer has created. The whole thing was just a joy to read.

While Scarlet is a resourceful young woman, just as Cinder is, the two characters are distinct, which I can’t stress strongly enough. Judging from other split-perspective books I’ve read, it’s hard to tell a story from two different points of view and keep the voices distinct, but Meyer does it well. Wolf is a good addition, too. Initially, he seems like he might be a typical “bad boy,” he’s got a well-developed backstory and is a great contrast to Kai, who is such a “good guy” it can be a bit wearisome.

For fans of Cinder, Scarlet won’t disappoint. It’s terrifically fun, accessible, well-written science fiction. I’m very much looking forward to the third and fourth books – I’m interested to see if Meyer is able to juggle three or four protagonists as handily as she did two. 

Review copy received from the publisher via Kelly (best co-blogger ever). Scarlet will be published February 5.

The concept behind Diverse Energies, a YA science fiction (mostly dystopian-esque) short story collection from Lee and Low, is admirable: all stories feature a person of color, something often lacking in the SFF world. The result, however, is a bit uneven. While some stories are interesting and well written, some are duds in either the plot or writing aspect (and sometimes both). I find that this is my normal reaction to short story collections on the whole, so it’s not unique to this anthology.

The Highs

Good Girl by Malinda Lo

This was my favorite of the stories. It’s difficult to squeeze in significant character development in a short story while also keeping the plot interesting, but Lo manages it with aplomb. In her vision of the future, the government rules the everyday lives of normal people, even mandating what job they will work at. They’re also obsessed with racial purity, mandating sterilization for anyone who gives birth to a mixed-race baby. Lo’s protagonist is one of these children. Her older brother has gone missing, and she travels to the tunnels beneath the city for clues to his whereabouts. There, she finds a group of people who may be willing to help her – or may just want to hurt her. She also uncovers secrets, which I always love in my dystopias.  

Gods of Dimming Light by Greg van Eekhout

This story gets major points for creativity. In van Eekhout’s future, permanent winter has descended upon the world, bringing with it poverty and starvation. His teenage protagonist, desperate for money and work, answers an advertisement for a paid medical study. Naturally, he gets much more than he bargained for, including a forced fight with an ancient Norse god. The storytelling is terrific and the concept is very cool. (You may all laugh at my pun now.)

Solitude by Ursula LeGuin

Buckell and Monti knew what they were doing when they chose to close the anthology with Le Guin’s story, which was previously published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1994. She puts most of these authors to shame with both writing and concept – but that’s not a knock on the other authors, it’s simply a testament to Le Guin’s skill. She’s the master.

The Lows

Pattern Recognition by Ken Liu

Liu has a great concept with his story – poor children who have the ability to recognize patterns in ways that computers can’t are taken from their homes and kept as near-slaves, forced to work for a corporation and told the “outside” no longer exists – but it seems to be purposely told out of order, which was an odd choice. The story itself is divided into three sections which I believe skipped around in time some. I’m actually not quite clear, since the jumps aren’t explained contextually (at least not thoroughly enough for my liking). The climax of the story is in letter form, which is disappointing – it could have been great as a bit of action, but instead is reduced to telling instead of showing.

Next Door by Rahul Kanakia

Parts of Kanakia’s story are interesting, but mostly it was too muddled for me to make sense of it. As a result, I got no clear idea of character or meaning. In Kanakia’s future, the upper class is so plugged in to their electronics that they don’t notice when the lower class move into their homes. Kanakia’s protagonist belongs to this lower class, and he’s desperate to find a place for his family to live that isn’t riddled with bugs. The garage they’re currently living in belongs to an upper class family, but this particular family is at least clued-in enough to notice when they try to move in to the main house. So, that’s out. What follows is the protag’s search for a new home with his boyfriend and a run-in with the upper class family’s son, who has goals of his own. I can’t explain much beyond that because I didn’t quite get it.

I realize in my reviews of the two previous stories that I may come across as not a very careful reader. I assure you I am, and I assure you I read portions of each of these stories twice in an effort to understand them and ensure I was being fair to them. It’s a tricky task to cram a creative, SF concept into a dozen or so pages, and the two authors above just didn’t succeed at it. (Insert obligatory ymmv note here.)

The rest of the stories fell squarely in the middle for me, both in terms of writing and plot. I’ve yet to read an anthology that satisfied me completely with every story. Moreover, I’ve yet to read an anthology where I even mildly enjoyed every story, but that’s just the nature of anthologies. You read through the mediocre ones to get to the gems, and you hope you’re so blown away that it was all worth it. I wouldn’t call Diverse Energies a rousing success, but it will definitely appeal to readers interested in SF shorts. The fact that it features a diverse cast of characters is just icing.

Review copy provided by the publisher. Diverse Energies is available October 1.

The concept of Erasing Time is so cool: teenage twins Sheridan and Taylor are taken from the present day into the far future by mistake and must learn how to survive in a world that is very, very different (and dangerous). The people who brought them to the future were intending to bring forward a brilliant (adult) scientist, but instead got the twins, and they’re not sure what to do with them now that they have them. There’s no possibility of a return trip.

The story is told mostly from the perspective of Sheridan, who is the more “average” of the twins. Taylor has always been the brilliant twin, the science whiz who graduated high school at an incredibly early age, went on to college, and is now studying for her PhD at age 18. Sheridan is smart, but no matter how smart she is, she feels that she’ll always pale in comparison to Taylor, who is also very outgoing.

The two girls must learn to work together to manage the situation they find themselves in. They have an ally – maybe – in Echo, a boy from the future whose job it is to translate the future English into the past English and vice versa. When the twins discover that the scientists from the future plan to fix their mistake by giving the girls memory washes, they go on the run, with the help of Echo.

I love reading books about the future in part because it’s always interesting to see what one person thinks that future will look like. Hill’s future is curious. People live in isolated cities, basically domes, ostensibly for their own safety, and they have no interaction with the outside world. Everyone has an ID chip implanted in their bodies, almost no buildings have actual walls, religion has been outlawed, and our system of government has been completely eliminated. There are different factions within the city, too – such as the dangerous Dakine, who use violence to achieve their goals, and the more benign “Doctor Worshippers,” whose name actually means something very different from what it sounds like.

The government tells citizens that natural plant and animal life no longer exist, and they’re nowhere to be found in the city. One of the most amusing parts of the book is when Echo tells the girls that the reason animals are now extinct is because the people in Sheridan and Taylor’s time ate them all. (Taylor is quick to point out to Sheridan that complete extinction of non-human animal life is impossible, since it would make human life impossible as well.) Actually, there are a lot of moments where the future culture has interpreted our current culture incorrectly, and it leads to most of the story’s laughs.

The way Hill uses language is interesting. The gap between future English and current English seems to be about the same as the gap between current English and Middle English – gibberish initially, but understandable once you practice at it. To make telling the story simpler, Hill doesn’t actually write out what the future English must sound like – she “translates” it for us via Echo, and once the girls learn to understand it, she “translates” it via them too. Hill also uses current English idioms to great effect, as a way for the twins to talk to each other without the future people knowing what they are really saying. I thought the language issue was an interesting touch, and it’s a problem I’ve always wondered about when reading stories set in the far future.

I think there are a lot of neat ideas in this book, but they aren’t executed terribly well. I’m a little unsure why the scientists from the future wanted to bring a scientist from today forward. It’s explained in the book, but not in a completely understandable way. I also think a couple of obvious secrets are withheld too long, making their ultimate revelations underwhelming. 

Mostly, I wanted more of a story. With the whole future world at her disposal, it seems like Hill told a rather pedestrian, small kind of story – Taylor and Sheridan must elude those who are out to get them, with the help of a boy from the future. I suppose I wanted more intrigue and excitement and less talking and pontificating. I wanted to see more of the future world through Sheridan and Taylor’s eyes, know more about the Dakine, and so on. Erasing Time ultimately left me unsatisfied. Still, it held my attention and should appeal to fans of time travel stories.