read for PopSugar 2019 Advanced Reading Challenge: a LitRPG book

If there's one thing Marie Lu excels at it is writing a fast paced plot forward book. Seriously, in all her books I've read I absolutely FLY through them. She's great at keeping up the pace and making sure the story moves along. The action scenes at the end? Riveting! All I could imagine as how fantastic this series could be developed into a film or TV, because I was seeing these fights light up before my eyes. I even teared up at one of the final confrontations because the action had built so well.

Lu is also so excellent at keep her characters diverse. I think this book was one of the first times I've read a nonbinary character? Nothing else is coming to mind at the moment. None of the characters even blink when its explained that Jesse prefers they/them pronouns. Which is beautiful! Sure their role is very small in the novel, but all I could think about is a nonbinary kid or teen reading this and seeing themselves reflected. The diversity was one of the features I adored from the first novel, and although we get way less of the Phoenix Riders here, I'm still so excited by how Marie Lu purposefully crafts her novels where not all the characters look alike.

However, this sequel fell a little flat for me compared to how much fun I had with [b:Warcross|41014903|Warcross (Warcross, #1)|Marie Lu|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1533058119s/41014903.jpg|49634052]. Which makes a lot of sense considering that Warcross was bright and splashy as it introduced us to this new world, and Wildcard had to deal with a pretty explosive ending. The ante was upped and it didn't completely meet expectations. I've realized my crux of the issue is this: Wildcard deals with deeply nuanced topics but handles them in a rather black and white way. The new adversaries introduced were almost cartoonishly villainous.

Taylor was just... zero development was given. Emika trusts her instantly which I saw through that shit, and then is shocked by her real motives. Girl...

For the villain of this book to be truly well done, this series would have needed to be a trilogy. I mean I like that it was a duology, but I think the larger goal of this novel suffered because too much was happening at once.

This book dives deep into morality and control as well as reality and artificial intelligence. In some ways it was handled well, ie Zero's storyline, and in other ways it didn't hold up at all, ie Hideo. Just... wow. All the bad things that are done are explained away because of his tragic backstory of losing his brother. I'm so frustrated with Hideo in this novel, although I'll put why in a spoiler warning.

What Hideo did was absolutely evil. The algorithm was evil!! My feelings towards him can basically be summed by Jake Peralta from Brooklyn 99, "cool motive, still murder." I mean I don't care that Taylor died, but Hideo committed so many goddamn crimes and he basically gets off free!! No!! Throw him in jail!! You can still write a love story even if we're honest about how evil Hideo was. Emika can be in love with a bad guy! love is complicated! But Hideo deserved some comeuppance and I was so annoyed. Also... this algorithm is supposed to root out the bad guys and you're telling me that nothing happened with authority structures? Not a single crooked cop turned themselves in? Yeah completely unbelievable to me.

Look morality is deeply complicated but this book doesn't seem to handle it in that fashion. Things end much to tidy for my liking considering how dark these plot lines were. I feel like that could be written off as "well this is YA" but frankly, I expect more of YA novels. Dig into the complicated and messy nature of life. Life doesn't always get wrapped up with a pretty bow. Actions have consequences, and unfortunately most of them weren't addressed in this book.