MetaWars: Fight for the Future

I picked up Trance with the hope of it being a fun read. That's what I wanted, and that's exactly what I got, so if that's what you want, your search has ended, and I definitely endorse Trance as a read. Is it perfect? No, but it does have some great points.

Naturally and not particularly surprising, the best part of the book is the plot. The book starts on a tense scene while a group of metahuman kids attempt to take on the Banes (the bad guys.) And then suddenly everyone loses their powers. Perfect, I love when books spell out their plots and make me want to see the resolution. Why did everyone lose their powers, and more curiously, why did they suddenly get them back? The plot is really brought to life by Meding's other great strength: worldbuilding. The post metawar world is not a nice place, but more importantly it really ups the complexity. The media is all over their reapperance. Reactions are complicated to put it mildly, which puts them in the awkward position of dealing with politics both from the government and their own internal conflicts.

Drawbacks? Have you read urban fantasy? Then a lot of it is going to look pretty familiar to you. Like pretty much all Urban Fantasy's Protagonists Teresa starts off as your average down on her luck waitress who struggles to pay her bills because UF protags always have dead end jobs, no money, and troubled pasts. However he life pulls a one-eighty, and she soon ends up manifesting a set of powers–not her old powers, but a new set which makes her one of the most powerful metas on the planet. Newly repowered the metas assemble at an old base while they find themselves being targeted by Spectre, the Big Bad Bane who started the meta wars. Able to mentally posess anyone, the new Ranger team has to confront and kill their loved ones and people guilty of nothing more than being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Spectre is a fantastic villain who is capable of driving the strong central conflict, and he clearly enjoys messing with the Rangers because there's nothing they can do about it. But, and this is my big issue, his plan is really, really stupid. Even though the why everything gets neatly laid out in the end, it still seems awkward and clunky.

So what keeps this novel from being really great? Brash, temperamental, Massive Trust Issues, but ferociously protecting that heart of gold as I've said she'll be familiar. Not a bad thing necessarily sometimes you need a difficult pigheaded heroine! But the rest of the cast falls flat. The Rangers are all Good with a capital G and not mention Nice. Despite the implied struggles after the power loss, it doesn't seem to have had any long lasting effects. They're all good, polite, people. Even the most morally ambiguous characters are chagrined in all the right places and confess casually to things they worked hard to keep hidden previously. They connections and relationships seem contrived and artificial. Teresa immediately rebonds with her childhood best friend that she hasn't seen in fifteen years like nothing happened although they're practically polar opposites. Wut?

Characters fall in and out of love, die, and disappear without leaving much of an emotional impact on the other characters or the reader. They don't seem to have really high emotinal stakes at all. The return of their powers is treated with general nonchalance and even at what was supposed to be one of the book's most emotional reveals reads more along the lines of a weather report. It doesn't help that the dialogue often seems contrived and unnatural, written so that the reader can get exposition or to set up a one liner. It smooths out as the book goes on probably helped by the fact that no one needs to info dump anymore. But do we really need a Hispanic character that randomly replaces words with Spanish? The stereotyping! It hurts!

There are a few things that don't quite match up in the book that probably should have been caught by an editor. It does feel like the first book in a series, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Once the series finds its feet and breaks away from the pack, it could be great.