#53 Warcross

Warcross by Marie Lu

Ready Player One meets Dota 2, if you like either of those then you will undoubtedly love this!

A few years ago i read Legend and really enjoyed it then quickly followed it up by reading Prodigy which i also enjoyed, ive no idea why i never finished the trilogy by reading Champion... I think at the time a lot of people said it wasnt a great ending so i avoided it. My point is that i enjoyed the writing and since then ive added a few more of her books to my TBR, mainly The Young Elites which i am yet to read but when i saw the gorgeous cover of Warcross i knew i had to have it, its beautiful!

I read the description and instantly fell in love with the premise and actually started it quite soon after buying it i picked it up to read which is rare, normally they sit dormant in my bedroom for ages!

The story follows Emika Chen who is an orphaned juvenile delinquent living in a run down apartment in New York City, she is a skilled hacker and works as a bounty hunter meaning she hunts down petty criminals for the police department to cash in the monetary reward. When she is 3 months behind on her rent and faces imminent eviction she decides to hack into the game Warcross which has a yearly tournament for the best teams, she decides to try and steal a high level power up from one of the players in order to sell to pay off her rent arrears but when she accidentally glitches into the game for the whole world to see she fears that she will be arrested but when she receives a call from Hideo Tanaka the owner of Henka Games who created Warcross instead of anger he offers her a job... She must track down another hacker called Zero who is trying to sabotage the tournament so she is ultimately entered into the Warcross tournament as a Wildcard.

Right so for full disclosure reasons i really couldnt get into the first half of the book, i found it SO bloody boring! Dont get me wrong there were bits and pieces that happened that were interesting but i was thinking why isnt the game being explained more? why isnt she explaining more about the glasses and how they work? I love love loved the world but couldnt get why she didnt build on it more, it was so futuristic and cool but the story focused way too much on Emika! Also the romance was ever so slightly unnecessary, they could have followed the exact same path and just been friends, i hate unnecessary romance!

At around 62% of the way through i suddenly became so invested in the story, something just clicked and i then understood why it had so many 4 and 5 star ratings! For me the most interesting part of this story was the game Warcross, i want to play it! it sounds quite similar to Dota 2 which i spent so much wasted youth playing (no regrets!) unfortunately the story didnt revolve too much around the game and it just a side plot and judging by how this book ended i heavily doubt it will even feature in the sequel!

I have settled on a 3.5 stars rating as i cant forgive how crap the first half was, im sure many people loved it from the start but i just couldnt gel with it but once i was into it OMG couldnt put it down and i will most definitely be picking up the sequel (when it decreases in price and they release a paperback version) also im calling this now, i bet they make this into a film and done right it would be epic!