Know your
enemy and know yourself, that's how to win the battle. Such are the truths
learned by 15-year-old June Iparis, whose greatest fear—the
destruction of the Republic she loves—is also her key to survival.
Fast-tracked by the government for a life on the front lines like her older
brother, Metias, June is the youngest, nimblest recruit in an elite group.
Meanwhile, on the other side of this dystopian, war-torn Los Angeles lives a
teenage boy known to the authorities as "Day," the most wanted—and
yet, adamantly anti-violence—criminal in the Republic. When Day is
accused of murdering Metias, and June is assigned to track him down, their
lives intersect, forcing secrets about the Republic to rise to the surface.
There's as much to admire here about the heroine—who wouldn't root
for a kid who proclaims, in the name of research, "It wasn't
my fault I had to scale the side of a 19-story building with
an XM-621 gun strapped to my back"—as there is to learn about the
supposed Robin Hoodesque "villain." Thankfully, the two's adventures
continue in
Prodigy and
Champion,
as the bonus of YA fiction is that story never ends with book one. The joy of
the genre, however, is that we become—for a few hundred
pages—as invincible and immortal as the protagonists.