Warcross - Marie Lu [Review]

Title: Warcross [Warcross #1]

Author: Marie Lu

Genre: Young Adult, Science fiction, Fiction

Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers

Publishing date: September 12th 2017

Pages: 353

Rating

★★★★☆

Hello I can finally review this book that was one of my most anticipated reads of 2017.

Warcross is set in a futuristic world where technology of augmented reality has advanced a lot thanks to a young man, Hideo Tanaka. Hideo created a thing called Neurolink, glasses that let the user see elements of augmented reality in their surroundings and lets them play a popular game called Warcross, created by Tanaka too. The obsession with Warcross started ten years ago and its fan base now spans the globe, some eager to escape from reality and others hoping to make a profit.

The book follows the story of Emika Chen a girl who’s struggling to make ends meet; she is

Emika Chen

teenage hacker who works as a bounty hunter, tracking down players who bet on the game illegally. But the bounty hunting world is a competitive one, and survival has not been easy. Needing to make some quick cash, Emika takes a risk and hacks into the opening game of the international Warcross Championships—only to accidentally glitch herself into the action and become an overnight sensation.

Convinced she’s going to be arrested, Emika is shocked when instead she gets a call from the game’s creator, the elusive young billionaire Hideo Tanaka, with an irresistible offer. He needs a spy on the inside of this year’s tournament in order to uncover a security problem . . . and he wants Emika for the job. With no time to lose, Emika’s whisked off to Tokyo and thrust into a world of fame and fortune that she’s only dreamed of. But soon her investigation uncovers a sinister plot, with major consequences for the entire Warcross empire.

I really enjoyed the book, the premise is interesting and reminded me a lot of the anime and light novels, Sword Art Online, mainly the movie, Ordinal Scale (I loved it even if I didn’t like the TV show). I liked the idea of more realistic augmented reality videogames, way beyond of Pokémon Go.

The main characters here are Emika and Hideo. They are good characters, I liked Emika because she is a really smart and brave person, and Hideo is kind of the typical sexy billionaire man, but highly intelligent and hard to decipher at first. Even if I liked Hideo, some parts of him made me think he was being too arrogant and kind of annoying, but he’s still an interesting character.  As you may sense there is supposed to be something between those two characters, and they do have chemistry and some sexual tension, but I felt their relationship moved too fast to be believable.

Marie Lu during the Warcross tour

The book is interesting and keeps the reader hooked since the start with the mystery of “who’s behind the hacking of Warcross? And what is their intention?” The pace is slow sometimes, but it’s compensated with the wonderful writing style of Marie Lu and the way she transports the reader into the heart of Warcross, making you dream with such technology to enhance the beauty of the everyday world. Emika sometimes has to enter into the “Dark World”, an equivalent of the Deep Web inside Warcross, and those were my favorite moments, I really liked the mysterious and dangerous vibe at that place.

The thing I liked the least were the Warcross matches and practices, I kind of skimmed those parts.

The highlight of the book is the end, the end is awesome and I cannot wait to read the second installment. At the end Emika, and the reader, are presented with a moral dilemma. Both parts have a good reason behind their actions, but both are wrong in their methods, and I love that kind of dilemmas.

Warcross is a colorful read with a good protagonist, an intriguing premise and a well described and imaginative setting. If you like videogames, you may like this book.