Nicole Kornher-Stace

This is a prequel to Firebreak, which I have not read. It may help to know a bit about the Firebreak world, but this book can stand alone.

Flight and Anchor are the designations given to two runaways from a secret military program that trains soldiers. Flight is a soldier who wants to move as far as possible from their prison as fast as possible. Anchor wants to be sure they have a getaway plan that will work. Flight and Anchor are just kids.

It's a short book, only around 170 pages, so it doesn't take much time to read. It's an ok book but I didn't find it to be much different from other escape books I have read.

I received an ARC copy of this book directly from the publisher.… (meer)

The first few pages of this were vivid and textured and promised something nicely off-kilter, but by about a third of the way in, Nicole Kornher-Stace shifts gears to a much more rote YA dystopia. So much of the book is taken up with the main character, Wasp, learning about events from centuries before via a kind of flashback device that sap the plot of much momentum and make her curiously passive—even though I'm sure we're supposed to read this as a quest narrative through which Wasp learns to come into herself, yadda yadda.

Kornher-Stace gestures towards world-building, but there are gaping plot holes and inconsistencies. Characters do that thing of not communicating with one another because, well, the book needs to be another 100 pages longer so why share this helpful information? This is true both on the part of the unnamed ghost (ah, the plot convenient bouts of amnesia!) and of Wasp herself (never once in all their walking through the underworld does someone whom we're told is smart and curious about the world and who's basically a professional ghost-knife-wielding anthropologist take the chance to ask the ghost questions about the past and what happened to the world? no?).

A book with no sense of its own purpose.… (meer)

When I saw and heard about this book being a cross between Ready Player One and Black Mirror, I was all psyched to check it out, but it ended up being a little disappointing for me personally. It was too much of a dark apocalyptic type feel to it for me also.
This does have some good parts to it and I did like it some. It's about a girl, Mal with her friend, Jessa, and how they have to find work, do whatever they can to make ends meet to be able to buy the bare necessities for life like water. Part of how they come into hitting the jackpot where they get a bunch of money, supplies including a lot of water is because of their live streaming in the game and while they're doing this they discover through talking to some other people corruption in the game and with all the big businesses that are in charge, Stellaxis and Greenleaf. What they find is very disturbing, to say the least when they go looking into the corruption. The last half of the book is when it started to get a little more interesting and pick up, but I struggled to read and finish this book because it was not quite what I expected, there was a bit more of a bleak world, etc. and a lot more profanity than I usually like to read.
If you like dystopian reads or this author, you'll probably like it more than I did so make sure to put this on your list. Thanks to NetGalley and Gallery/Saga Press for letting me read and review this book. All opinions are my own.… (meer)