I would like to thank Net Galley and Orchard Books for providing me with an eARC of this book for review. Receiving this book for free has in no way influenced my opinion or review.
Blurb from Goodreads:
Back in her hometown, Tori Beaugrand had everything a teenaged girl could want—popularity, money, beauty. But she also had a secret. A secret that could change her life in an instant, or destroy it.
Now she’s left everything from her old life behind, including her real name and Alison, the one friend who truly understood her. She can’t escape who and what she is. But if she wants to have anything like a normal life, she has to blend in and hide her unusual... talents.
Plans change when the enigmatic Sebastian Faraday reappears and gives Tori some bad news: she hasn’t escaped her past. In fact, she’s attracted new interest in the form of an obsessed ex-cop turned investigator for a genetics lab.
She has one last shot at getting her enemies off her trail and winning the security and independence she’s always longed for. But saving herself will take every ounce of Tori’s incredible electronics and engineering skills—and even then, she may need to sacrifice more than she could possibly imagine if she wants to be free.
So the first thing I can tell you is that if you have not read Ultraviolet, the first book in this series, you will not understand this book one bit. So stop here, turn around, go back and read it! Plus, if you keep going forwar, you might get some spoilers that you would be unhappy with!
When I saw this book on Net Galley I got very excited. I read the first book when it came out last year. To be honest, I wasn't a lover of the first book in this series. It was interesting and mysterious enough, but ran kind of slow for me until just after the midpoint of the book. But once I found out the underlying premise of the book, I was really intrigued, enough that I had to go back and read a few of the chapters to see where all the clues were! So, seeing that this one was available, I requested it immediately. And when I got approved, I dove right in!
This book is actually from the POV of a secondary character that was in the first book, Tori (Nikki). it was great to learn more about this character, who was pinned as the snobby stuck up girl that looked down on the main character of the first book. Yet, with the knowledge of who she is and why the main character of the first book reacted to her the way she did. So Quicksilver really shows the reader who Tori is. She's strong and independent, maybe more so than I would think a normal teenage girl would be. But she's not really normal after all, is she? I can see how she must have been a challenge for the author to write. She had to act just enough like a teenage so people would be fooled. Not easy for a being who far surpasses a normal human! She's also insanely brave. Things just don't seem to scare her. It's nice to see a teenage character that is focused and sure.
We also meet up with a new character in this book, Milo. He's this smart and geeky guy who works with Tori/Niki at the grocery store. Somehow they form a friendship, which of course he wants to take to the next level but it's complicated by who Tori is and how she views herself. Their relationship is actually so much deeper than just a silly teenage romance. Milo is completely trust worthy and honorable. He's also quirky and funny and his banter with Tori/Niki really makes many parts of this book. Mosty he's insanely sweet and loyal, which makes him a totally swoonable character in my mind.
We also meet up with some characters from book #1: Sebastian, Deckard, even Alison. It's nice to see them worked in while at the same time watching the book grow through Tori's POV.
The plot to this story, as with the first, is totally unusual and different. With the first book, I had no idea where is was going, so when it go there, I was floored. With this book, I knew what I was dealing with, but I didn't know where it would go or what was left of the story. I was actually surprised to see this story was not from Alison's POV, but I enjoyed seeing how the story really did focus and belong in Tori's ball court from the very beginning.
The twists and turns Anderson uses in this book keep it intense and moving. I wasn't bored, I didn't want to put the book down and I NEEDED to see where it was heading. For me, this is huge in a book. But this intensity is not because there tons of action scenes that move it along it's actually an intensity that is built through feeling the emotions of the main character as she narrates her story. I have to say that I haven't seen this in many books. Most books need the action to move it along, but I didn't feel there was a great need to have that in this book. I loved that I could just be pulled along because I needed to be in Tori's head and realize what it was she was heading towards.
The most amazing thing to me in this book is thinking about the amount of research that had to go into it to make it feel and look completely easy to read, while being overwhelmingly technical all at once. I have to admit that there were many parts where the narrator was talking about all kinds of technical instruments and parts and I thought I would be completely lost. But I wasn't, I actually found myself reading faster during these parts as Tori connected wires and parts and built a machine that I didn't have any idea what is would be used for. It didn't matter because in the end, it just kind of all came together and made sense!
Anderson has crafted another wildly original, fantastically moving story that kept me riveted from beginning to end. Once I started it, I really didn't want to put it down. I was never bored or frustrated with where it was going. And the information was unmanageable. If you're looking for an origin Sci-fi YA series, then you should go out and pick this one up. It was nothing I expected at all, and it turned out to be everything my brain wanted.
4 out of 5 stars from
R.J. Anderson (known to her friends as Rebecca) was born in Uganda, raised in Ontario, went to school in New Jersey, and has spent much of her life dreaming of other worlds entirely.
Now married and a mother of three, Rebecca reads to her sons the classic works of fantasy and science fiction that enlivened her own childhood, and tries to bring a similar excitement and timeless wonder to the novels she writes for children and teens. She currently lives in the beautiful theatre town of
Stratford, Ontario.
"*I received a copy of this book for free to review, this in no way
influenced my review, all opinions are 100% honest and my own."
"Thanks to the publisher or author for sending me this copy!"
As a child she immersed herself in fairy tales, mythology, and the works of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and E. Nesbit; later she found inspiration in books byUrsula LeGuin, Patricia A. McKillipand Robin McKinley, and learned to take as much pleasure from their language as the stories they told.
Now married and a mother of three, Rebecca reads to her sons the classic works of fantasy and science fiction that enlivened her own childhood, and tries to bring a similar excitement and timeless wonder to the novels she writes for children and teens. She currently lives in the beautiful theatre town of Stratford, Ontario.
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