Wildcard

When it came to Warcross, I loved what this book offered. It was an excellent book about a girl who manages to take a fun game and stretches it out into different ideas about how much power should a person have? How much should we use technology? When is the right time to say enough is enough, as far as technology is concerned? These were all fascinating questions, delivered with an interesting character, and shown through a fun online game that made me hungry for more. In the sequel, I wanted to see how Emika managed to beat Hideo and also see more warcross games. Yet, Wildcard does not manage to deliver on any of these elements, instead wiping away anything cool in exchange for a mediocre sci-fi thriller.

As I sit here writing this review, I must admit that I am struggling to come up with anything praiseworthy in this book. It tries to deliver on the Warcross game only twice through the whole book, and even then, it isn't enough to satisfy me in terms of action.

Instead, we get the main focus being the ideologies and ideas of technology and power as defined through Zero and Hideo. Most of the book is spent exploring their ideas, and Emika suffers as a result. She no longer is the kick butt character that we saw in the first one, who is proactive and manages to find a third way out when she is stuck between a rock and a hard place. In fact, she seems to be doing whatever a group wants her to be doing at any given time. Both Zero, and Hideo want to control the algorithm that Hideo has created, but for seemingly different reasons, and at first, it seems like they are different group with clearly defined goals, but as the novel develops, we see that they are more similar than we think. Now, a more talented author could use this to her advantage, showing how the two groups are both so similar that both need to be taken down and use Emika to find a third way to win. Yet Lu is not that subtle, literally having to tell us this theme, and making it extremely obvious to the reader from the beginning.

Emika, meanwhile has almost no agency in this book. She is not able to play the double agent card well, and it is instead used as a way for her to get close to Hideo, whom she still loves. On that note, the romance features heavily in this book, and I like it here about as much as in the first book, which is to say, not at all. She still seems to love him because he is hot, and Hideo loves her because of her unpredictability, I guess. Still, it is not a strong reason, and Lu's dialogue just seems to be going through the motions when they are together on page.

I suppose, if you were to force me to say it, this book does have some powerful twists that I did not seem coming, but that is undercut by the fact that most of this book is exposition to get to those plot twists. In fact, I'm wondering why the editor didn't just cut this book down by 100 pages or so of unnecessary filler, and make Warcross all one book (I know, I know...money). That would have made more sense, since so much of this book consists of exposition to justify the twist, it makes me wonder why it has to be this big anyway. That exposition also ruins the pacing, which makes it a slog to get through by the middle of the book, ironically, when the biggest and most interesting twist is revealed. This makes me tired of the book before it even begins to end.

This is a lesson that a few good twists does not a good book make. I can't really recommend this series because to watch a book with such a strong premise to crumble away into lines of exposition was disappointing. In the end I give this book a two out of five. Why didn't this series just put all of its cards on the table in the first place?

Not as good as the first book, but the ending should satisfy readers. However, the time it took to get there was looooong and Emika really lacked agency in the solutions. There were some of the characters that you cared about in the first book, but to a much smaller degree, as this book mainly focuses on Emika/Hideo/Zero.