Warcross

I'm real behind on my reviewing, so I've already got the library copy of sequel, Wildcard, in my possession. Matt saw it on the breakfast table this morning, and commented that it didn't look like a book I would normally pick up. So I told him how it was the sequel to a different book, that Warcross was a YA novel with a heroine who's a hacker and who plays this video game and makes friends with/lurrrrves the guy who created the video game but then has to thwart the system he's created and she's is basically the best hacker to ever hack, but she's not really scrappy (Matt asked if she was scrappy because all YA heroines are scrappy) because she's dating a billionaire and that makes scrappiness kind of unnecessary.

Which I felt was a pretty good summary for something he's never going to read. ANYWAY.

Overall, I really enjoyed. I have a small nitpick that might be a bigger nitpick when you think too hard about it, but WHY must every YA novel heroine be the greatest whatever of all time? Like, Emika seems to be a normal struggling bounty hunter that's about to get evicted because she can't pay her bills, and she hacks/glitches into a video game (which, to me, as a not-video-game-player, feels like she's maybe not that good at it if that happens?), and then the billionaire video game designer hires her because when he asked her to find a problem in his video game code it took her like a minute and a half, despite that his engineers whom he pays have spent hours and days and weeks looking for this problem, because she's the greatest hacker to ever hack despite having super out-of-date equipment and also a two year ban from using computers, but magically she's better at this than everyone who gets paid to create and maintain this game.

I know, I know ... because otherwise we have no story. Sigh.

I could punch some other holes in some other things, but like I said, I did like this, so I think I'll just leave it at that. The world within the game that Lu created was fun, Emika's teammates seemed cool even though she doesn't seem like someone you'd actually want to be on a team on (she like never showed up for practice!), the big bad was interesting and clearly I liked it enough to go ahead and request the sequel immediately, which almost never happens.

I listened to the audiobook and the reader was good.