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A review by lizshayne
Buried Heart by Kate Elliott
3.0
How do you end your revolution?
This is the hard question for all YA novels - if you stage the revolt, you have to follow through with the possibility of real change. But you have to make your overthrow believable. Elliott has something of an advantage as she has not written some weird futuristic police state and many of her characters actually have records of the previous rule, but she still has the basic problem, which is pulling off a plausible rebellion.
Overall, she sticks the landing and her rationale rests not on lucky breaks or volte faces, but on reasonable machinations behind the scenes and characters we already know to be sympathetic in positions where they can effect change. So that was better than average and very fun.
The book did take a while to get back into--this is a series problem that I don't think I will ever get over--but it was pretty interesting once it was there and I enjoyed watching the plot weave its way to its conclusion. I do sometimes find that Elliott gets a little too caught up in world building and it leaves her characters feel a bit underdrawn, which happened in a few places here, but not in a way that hurt the book. There was more than enough adventure to hold my attention.
This is the hard question for all YA novels - if you stage the revolt, you have to follow through with the possibility of real change. But you have to make your overthrow believable. Elliott has something of an advantage as she has not written some weird futuristic police state and many of her characters actually have records of the previous rule, but she still has the basic problem, which is pulling off a plausible rebellion.
Overall, she sticks the landing and her rationale rests not on lucky breaks or volte faces, but on reasonable machinations behind the scenes and characters we already know to be sympathetic in positions where they can effect change. So that was better than average and very fun.
The book did take a while to get back into--this is a series problem that I don't think I will ever get over--but it was pretty interesting once it was there and I enjoyed watching the plot weave its way to its conclusion. I do sometimes find that Elliott gets a little too caught up in world building and it leaves her characters feel a bit underdrawn, which happened in a few places here, but not in a way that hurt the book. There was more than enough adventure to hold my attention.