Still, it's wonderfully refreshing to see a heroine using her brain to win a war rather than strapping on a sword and charging into battle.ĭespite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel, reminiscent of Naomi Kritzer's Fires of the Faithful (2002), keeps this entry fresh.Ī gripping thriller in dystopic future Los Angeles.įifteen-year-olds June and Day live completely different lives in the glorious Republic. Elisa’s "mountainous" body shrivels away when she spends a month on forced march eating rat, and thus she is a better person. With a character so smart that she doesn't have much to learn, body size is stereotypically substituted for character development. Elisa uses her untried strategic knowledge to always-good effect. War is coming, and perhaps only Elisa's Godstone-and knowledge from the Belleza Guerra-can save them. With no warning, this fat, self-loathing princess is married off to a distant king and is embroiled in political and spiritual intrigue. She's a devout reader of holy books and is well-versed in the military strategy text Belleza Guerra, but she has been kept in ignorance of world affairs. Likely headed for the best-seller lists-but not on its merits.Īdventure drags our heroine all over the map of fantasyland while giving her the opportunity to use her smarts.Įlisa-Princess Lucero-Elisa de Riqueza of Orovalle-has been chosen for Service since the day she was born, when a beam of holy light put a Godstone in her navel. Sample chapters, not labeled as such, from three spinoff novellas are appended. Following the climactic denouement, the young heroes end up more or less where they were in the previous episode: split up and on the run. Confusingly, three of the Loriens switch off as first-person narrators but are given (whether from authorial inertia or incompetence) indistinguishable voices.
Here, the already indigestibly large cast of teenage Loriens and their human helpers gains three and loses one as two chancy new allies, multiple gems with mystical properties, prophetic visions of terrifying doom, ravening monsters, mysterious scars and hints of new powers arrive to add more flimsy trinkets to the literary flea market. These are packed in between the paltry number of violent but widely spaced encounters with brutish Mogadorian invaders. The tale has already become so complicated that even confirmed series fans may welcome the long, sluggish stretches of hanging out, fretting, flirting, bickering and undisguised recaps. “Lore” (aka James Frey) moves his ponderous, jumbled science-fiction epic forward an inch by dropping a traitor into the band of superpowered refugees charged with saving Earth from evil aliens.
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