Marie Lu is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Young Elites series, as well as the blockbuster Legend series. She graduated from the University of Southern California and jumped into the video game industry as an artist. Now a full-time writer, she spends her spare time reading, drawing, playing games, and getting stuck in traffic. She lives in Los Angeles with her illustrator/author husband, Primo Gallanosa, and their dogs. You can visit Marie at Marielubooks.com. You can find more of my reviews of her work here.
Emika Chen barely made it out of the Warcross Championships alive. Now that she knows the truth behind Hideo's new NeuroLink algorithm, she can no longer trust the one person she's always looked up to, who she once thought was on her side. Determined to put a stop to Hideo's grim plans, Emika and the Phoenix Riders band together, only to find a new threat lurking on the neon-lit streets of Tokyo. Someone's put a bounty on Emika's head, and her sole chance for survival lies with Zero and the Blackcoats, his ruthless crew. But Emika soon learns that Zero isn't all that he seems—and his protection comes at a price. Caught in a web of betrayal, with the future of her free will at risk, just how far will Emika go to take down the man she loves? In this explosive sequel to the New York Times bestselling Warcross, Marie Lue delivers an addiction finale that will hold you captive until the very last page.
After the cliffhanger from Warcross, I knew I had to find a copy of Wildcard as soon as possible to see how this story ended. Finding out that Hideo was the enemy was the worst! Because I totally thought him and Emika would end up together after battling against Zero, to find out who we really is was shocking, but made for a great ending. Now, Emika is faced with trying to understand the Tanaka brothers—who is Hideo? Who is Zero? The plot for this one certainly thickens as Emika falls into Zero's world, in order to understand his motivation, and how that aligns with the technology Hideo has created.
I will say, though, this sequel falls prey to the slump in the middle—after getting introduced to a whole new cast of characters, and getting a new set-up, I just found it slow going in the middle one hundred and fifty pages of the novel. This isn't due to Lu's writing—she is able to keep each scene engaging or adventurous, which means it was quick reading. But the plot dropped for a moment, and I found myself lost to a full understanding of what was going on. This was helped by the way the novel is divided into the "days until" framework, but, even then, it was a bit of a push-through until the end.
It was also a change to see that this novel was more about the brothers than it was about Emika. After really riding along with Emika from New York to Tokyo and learning about her past and what she wanted for her future, it was a gear-shift to the Tanaka brothers in Wildcard. Not necessarily a bad thing at all, but rather something to get used to as we learn more about who Zero is and how we came to be, and working to understand Hideo's motivations. We get a lot of their backstory, and it is a little jarring to see Emika's motivations drop off the page for a while as we learn about the Tanaka brothers, but it's great when Emika's motivations and desires end up back on the page and leave us with a fulfilling ending to the duology.
Lu's writing, as always, is incredibly thought-provoking. This novel is centered around so many different questions: Who owns technology? What is the power of technology? Is the world better with created technology, or better when technology is destroyed? Who is in charge of technology? What is a general population member's responsibility in this global world? What is a leader's responsibility? I could go on and on about all the questions that Lu raises, in just Wildcard alone. I know that these questions are what I'm going to remember years later when reflecting back on this duology, because even though Lu doesn't give us any answers, she does give us a better empathetic understanding of what could happen, if it all went wrong. These questions, these philosophical explorations, is the power of the Warcross duology, and they are what makes the duology powerful, compulsively readable, and engaging. I would highly recommend this duology to any creator, any designer, anyone I knew who would be interested in creating, and should know about the challenges and triumphs of such a thing.
Marie Lu is a fantastic writer, and I can't wait to see more from her future projects. You can visit Marie at Marielubooks.com.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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