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crofteereader 's review for:
Firebreak
by Nicole Kornher-Stace
4.5 stars rounded up because...
Now that's what I call build-up. The beginning was a little slow, it felt like something we'd seen before and didn't really like (aka Ready Player One) and then we get plucked out of our cool video game and dropped into dystopian/corporate-owned/uber-capitalist hell.
Kornher-Stace brings up again and again the different tropes in other books: the plucky heroine who emerges from obscurity to lead a revolution and is, out of nowhere, a professional orator (which is very much not our MC Mal but it is Mal's friends Jessa and Keisha); the unstoppable super-soldier (also not remotely Mal, but 22 and 06); the villa giving a villain speech (which DOESN'T HAPPEN and I was so happy about that, honestly).
This book was just... You see the evil inherent in the way the media and the public gaze is presented. You see the imbalance of power between people (and companies) at all levels. You get to see small build-ups of real resistance. You get to see what happens when the fuse blows. And you see what real power is: the simple choices made to silence someone small with no consequence to the entity doing the silencing.
And the last... 40% was just... Non-stop.
Please excuse me while I go look up Kornher-Stace's other books and devour them.
{Thank you Saga for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review; all thoughts are my own}
Now that's what I call build-up. The beginning was a little slow, it felt like something we'd seen before and didn't really like (aka Ready Player One) and then we get plucked out of our cool video game and dropped into dystopian/corporate-owned/uber-capitalist hell.
Kornher-Stace brings up again and again the different tropes in other books: the plucky heroine who emerges from obscurity to lead a revolution and is, out of nowhere, a professional orator (which is very much not our MC Mal but it is Mal's friends Jessa and Keisha); the unstoppable super-soldier (also not remotely Mal, but 22 and 06); the villa giving a villain speech (which DOESN'T HAPPEN and I was so happy about that, honestly).
This book was just... You see the evil inherent in the way the media and the public gaze is presented. You see the imbalance of power between people (and companies) at all levels. You get to see small build-ups of real resistance. You get to see what happens when the fuse blows. And you see what real power is: the simple choices made to silence someone small with no consequence to the entity doing the silencing.
And the last... 40% was just... Non-stop.
Please excuse me while I go look up Kornher-Stace's other books and devour them.
{Thank you Saga for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review; all thoughts are my own}