Review: Warcross

Warcross by Marie Lu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I really loved this, it kept me engaged and entertained the whole book. Nancy Wu did an excellent job with the audio narration.  This fulfills my cyberpunk reading prompt challenge.  It hits most of the requirements for cyberpunk. 

This follows Emika Chen, a brillian hacker turned bounty hunter because she has to pay the bills. She's been banned from computers after pleading guilty to hacking to save a friends reputation. At her center Emika is a good person, but she knows that the world is an ugly place, so she tries to catch some of the bad guys and make some cash doing it. Emika typically hides in the shadows of the internet, but when one of her hacks goes wrong she finds herself glitched into the opening game of the Warcross tournament. Her anonymous identity isn't anonymous any longer and the developer of the world's favorite game offers her a job. Hideo developed Warcross, and now everyone in the world plays, but someone is hacking into the game and messing with Hideo's code. He asks Emika to go undercover as a Warcross wildcard player and use her hacking and bounty hunting skills to find the hacker that is trying to destroy Warcross. Emika finds herself entrenched in the dark side of the game and trying to uncover a mole within her Warcross teammates. She also finds an unexpected connection with the handsome, yet haunted billionaire. As she uncovers more about what is going on with the hacker, she also uncovers more about Hideo and finds so much more than she expected.

I could have done without the romance. It was a bit cheesy and predictable. I also figured out the plot twist pretty much right away, so the big reveal at the end was no surprise to me. The one thing I do like about Lu's writing is her somewhat villainous characters. You think they are the good guy, then they turn out the be kind of the bad guy but they still have redeeming qualities and you still want to like them. This book is much more character and plot driven. I would have liked a little more cyber and techno babble, but I know that isn't everyone's cup of tea. I really like that stuff because I'm a nerd. I think the Warcross games that the teams played were described very well as was the technology itself, I just wish there was more focus on that aspect of the book. I really enjoyed this and I'm looking forward to the sequel.

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