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anna_wa's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
hopeful
mysterious
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
3.75
Sometimes you eventually make your way around to those books you said years and years ago that you wanted to read - and on the rare occasions you do that, you are hit with permanent written evidence of how much things have changed in 20 years. Namely, the characters giving each other quarters in order to make a call on a payphone and one of the characters being decidedly rich in comparison to her peers because she actually owns a computer.
Despite the slaps to the face of how much time has passed extremely quickly, this is still overall a good Scott Westerfeld trilogy. All of the things that made me first fall in love with his writing at 12 years old reading Uglies are present here too: fantastic world-building, teenage characters that do feel like real teenagers (for better or worse), and of course.. an attention-grabbing first sentence of the book paired with an attention-keeping last sentence of the book. His pair of "perfect first sentence + perfect last sentence" is something I still try to emulate in my own writing today.
I will say though... in comparison to the first two books of the trilogy, this book felt flatter in comparison to me personally. I don't know how to pinpoint what exactly the reasoning for that is because it's all here: action, adventure, a mystery, high-stakes, and a good conclusion. It's hard for me to figure out, exactly, what is missing from this book that the other two had.
One hint towards the answer might be that the first book felt like it really did end on a cliff-hanger. An ending note of "there is still more to come, read the next book now". But I didn't really feel that when I finished the second book - in fact, for the most part, I felt like it could have just been a duology. Even though there were still certain things left up in the air, the second book really made me feel the punch of the end of a movie with the credits rolling. It didn't seem to end with that same "there is still more to come, read the next book now" urgency.
Maybe the truth is I just wasn't as interested in Rex's dilemma in this book as I was with Jessica's in the first book and Dess's in the second one. Maybe it's that simple.
In any case, overall I enjoyed this trilogy. I definitely did NOT enjoy the fact that this book and the book before it drop the r slur 3 different times - and in this book specifically two of those three instances are a person bullying another person (as opposed to someone just being like "oh my gosh this is sooo [beep]").
It seems to me that Scott Westerfeld has changed a lot in the last twenty years (as most people do) and, based on his newer Impostor books, I don't get the sense that he would ever use that word again. But it was still extremely uncomfortable for me to read it, so that is why I want to warn everybody who decides to read it that that is there. There are also other ableist microaggressions in the second and third book especially; I mostly tuned them out/replaced them in my brain because I feel like Westerfeld has changed and wouldn't write those again if he were writing the books now, but yeah. They do exist, so watch out for that.
Despite the slaps to the face of how much time has passed extremely quickly, this is still overall a good Scott Westerfeld trilogy. All of the things that made me first fall in love with his writing at 12 years old reading Uglies are present here too: fantastic world-building, teenage characters that do feel like real teenagers (for better or worse), and of course.. an attention-grabbing first sentence of the book paired with an attention-keeping last sentence of the book. His pair of "perfect first sentence + perfect last sentence" is something I still try to emulate in my own writing today.
I will say though... in comparison to the first two books of the trilogy, this book felt flatter in comparison to me personally. I don't know how to pinpoint what exactly the reasoning for that is because it's all here: action, adventure, a mystery, high-stakes, and a good conclusion. It's hard for me to figure out, exactly, what is missing from this book that the other two had.
One hint towards the answer might be that the first book felt like it really did end on a cliff-hanger. An ending note of "there is still more to come, read the next book now". But I didn't really feel that when I finished the second book - in fact, for the most part, I felt like it could have just been a duology. Even though there were still certain things left up in the air, the second book really made me feel the punch of the end of a movie with the credits rolling. It didn't seem to end with that same "there is still more to come, read the next book now" urgency.
Maybe the truth is I just wasn't as interested in Rex's dilemma in this book as I was with Jessica's in the first book and Dess's in the second one. Maybe it's that simple.
In any case, overall I enjoyed this trilogy. I definitely did NOT enjoy the fact that this book and the book before it drop the r slur 3 different times - and in this book specifically two of those three instances are a person bullying another person (as opposed to someone just being like "oh my gosh this is sooo [beep]").
It seems to me that Scott Westerfeld has changed a lot in the last twenty years (as most people do) and, based on his newer Impostor books, I don't get the sense that he would ever use that word again. But it was still extremely uncomfortable for me to read it, so that is why I want to warn everybody who decides to read it that that is there. There are also other ableist microaggressions in the second and third book especially; I mostly tuned them out/replaced them in my brain because I feel like Westerfeld has changed and wouldn't write those again if he were writing the books now, but yeah. They do exist, so watch out for that.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Fire/Fire injury, Car accident, Torture, and Violence
Moderate: Death, Bullying, and Ableism
Multiple uses of the R word
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