Double Trouble
Review: Impostors by Scott Westerfeld
This trilogy is a sequel to Westerfeld's hugely underrated (IMO) Uglies post-apocalyptic YA series, and gets even more interesting.
At this point, Westerfeld is more explicit about this being post climate apocalypse (and possibly World War III). A dictator loses his son and replaces him with a daughter, Rafia, created using his dead wife's eggs...
...except he makes two of her. The second twin, Frey, exists solely to be Rafia's body double, trained as an assassin from a young age. Most people don't even know Frey exists. To say this ends badly is an understatement.
When another city asks for Rafia as hostage to secure a political situation, he sends Frey instead...and he has no intention of saving her. She's meant to die, the superfluous "spare."
This is a story about identity, at its heart. Uglies was very much about what people will do to fit in as well as about social control. Impostors is much more about the identities our parents force on us. It's also about abuse, and how physical abuse is not always the worst kind.
And it's also a fun adventure tale. YA dystopias are too often in the mold of Hunger Games or some variant of Divergent. Impostors is about the society that comes afterwards, and it's not all of a thing, either. Because it's also about political systems and freedom. This is a complicated book wrapped in an easy-to-read YA package.
Recommended.
Review: Shatter City by Scott Westerfeld
Shatter City starts where Impostors leads off. Rafi is now pretending to be Frey in the wild and Frey is pretending to be Rafi in Shreve City, forcibly engaged to Col. But Shreve is not the Shatter City of the title.
That is Paz, the city where everyone is happy...because everyone is surgically implanted with an emoji board (yes, really) on their arm to control their emotions. Yeouch. This is definitely a "your utopia is my dystopia" moment.
And Frey, of course, gets one...and becomes addicted to it. Rafi, meanwhile, is trying to manipulate everyone.
Frey is the sane one. And it goes darker from there...not too dark as this is, after all, YA, but dark enough.
Daddy Dearest really needs to go down...
Review: Mirror's Edge by Scott Westerfeld
Love the snide comment about how all books require a love triangle...in a series that emphatically doesn't have one.
This is not the last book, as a note. It gets dark as Frey, robbed by Rafia of even her name, disguises herself and her lover to invade Shreve and rescue...her dead brother's boyfriend. And a bunch of other people, mostly political prisoners.
The Free Cities plan to put Frey in charge, but Rafia double crosses everyone. It's been obvious for a while who the evil twin is.
Poor Frey.
And I want to know what happens next, but don't have the next book, which is the strongest recommendation I can give this so far.