Book Review: This Shattered World

Title: This Shattered World

Author: Amie Kaufman and Meagan Spooner

Genre: YA Romance/Sci-fi

Book Blurb:

Jubilee Chase and Flynn Cormac should never have met.

Lee is captain of the forces sent to Avon to crush the terraformed planet's rebellious colonists, but she has her own reasons for hating the insurgents.

Rebellion is in Flynn's blood. Terraforming corporations make their fortune by recruiting colonists to make the inhospitable planets livable, with the promise of a better life for their children. But they never fulfilled their promise on Avon, and decades later, Flynn is leading the rebellion.

Desperate for any advantage in a bloody and unrelentingly war, Flynn does the only thing that makes sense when he and Lee cross paths: he returns to base with her as prisoner. But as his fellow rebels prepare to execute this tough-talking girl with nerves of steel, Flynn makes another choice that will change him forever. He and Lee escape the rebel b ase together, caught between two sides of a senseless war.

Review:

Oh my god...this was book beautiful. I am starstruck by Kaufman and Spooner's writing. I loved how the book merges the two old characters from book one (These Broken Stars) into the second book of the trilogy oh so flawlessly. But seriously....the feels!!

Jubilee Chase, aka Lee, is probably one of my favorite characters I have read about so far (right up there with Day and June from Legend.) She has so much backstory (which the authors cleverly portrayed through little snippets at the beginning of each chapter) and I thought her character was very well fleshed out. If you're a big fan of the "tragic hero", I think you'll love Lee. Although she bears a heavy burden,  her snarky/sassy comments lightens up the mood so that it's not depressing :-)  The fact that Lee is a total badass doesn't hurt either. Thinking about it now, Lee reminds me of Adelina from The Young Elites.

Flynn was quite an interesting character as well. Even though the book blurb describes Flynn as "rebellious", in truth, he is considered the "pacifist" of the Fianna--the rebel group living on the planet of Avon. However, that doesn't mean he won't shoot (as he does shoot Lee when they first meet).  I thought Flynn nicely balanced out Lee.

Onto the plot--the pacing starts out pretty fast, then it slows a bit as Flynn and Lee's relationship develops, before picking up again until the very end. Plot wise, the story was pretty simple: Flynn suspects somebody is tampering with the terraforming developments of Avon.  Lee begins to suspect there is something unnatural about the Fury that makes off-worlders go mad when they visit Avon.  They eventually overcome their differences and unravel the mystery of Avon, with a little help with Tarver from book one.

I personally felt that the plot was weaker in This Shattered World compared to These Broken Stars because readers could more or less predict the cause of the Fury. I think the real gem of the story lies within the characters.

Rating: