Title: Override
Author:  Heather Anastasiu
Publisher/Year:  St Martin’s Press  2/12/13
Length:  320 Pages
Series: Glitch #2

Overview

Zoe is free. She has escaped the enslavement of the Community, disconnected from the hardware that had controlled her every thought and emotion, and evaded capture by the Chancellor intent on killing her. She is finally free, but she is far from safe.

Zoe and Adrien hide themselves from detection at the Foundation, an academy that trains teen glitchers to fight in the Resistance movement. Together, Zoe and her new team of superhuman fighters must risk their lives to rescue other glitchers and humans from the Chancellor’s control. Challenges abound at every turn, and Adrien, who has become silent, distant, and tormented by his visions of the future, only adds to the growing certainty of defeat. But worst of all, as Zoe’s team fights against impossible odds, distrust and betrayal leads to the terrible discovery that their greatest threat could already be lurking behind the safe walls of the Foundation.

My Thoughts

I’m kind of mixed about this one to be completely honest.  Going into this, we knew that Adrian, Zoe, Molla and Juan had managed to escape the Community and that Max had chosen to stay back with the Chancellor since he couldn’t bear to be around Zoe.  So, that means we know he’s clearly going to play some role in the future, fighting against them right?

When we start off in this 2nd installment, they are in hiding, Zoe living in the wall of a lab, hiding out since no one can know where she is, and her powers are more out of control than ever since 1) she doesn’t know how to control them at all, i.e. reign them in, and 2) since she expelled so much power to get out of the Underground, her body is somewhat rebelling.  As a result, her powers are giving her seizures that destroy things around her and it means that she’s in danger of being discovered.  At the same time, the Chancellor has been promoted to UnderChancellor of Defense and is now on the search for Zoe.  This potential discovery causes Adrian and Zoe to be on the run again, and things get interesting yet again.

Zoe’s allergies continue to be a huge issue, she can’t go anywhere without protection, so it’s with the help of a new biosuit that she’s finally able to survive outside of her hideout.  The Rez was in the process of building The Foundation which is a community of it’s own that will have both the air filtration system that Zoe needs as well as a training and education facility for all the other Glitchers that they have managed to save.  It’s upon arrival here that Zoe meets quite a few others that are like her and begin to work closely with her task force of superheroes in the hopes of killing the Chancellor and finding a way to protect everyone with a V chip.

My frustration with this story is that most of it is rather slow in the sense that you see that everyone else knows how to use their powers and it takes Zoe quite some time to get there.  it’s also really clear to me who’s on which side (if they are truly allies or enemies instead) and it’s really just a matter of time to find out what’s going to happen.  It’s only the last 25% of the book, maybe not even that where we get quite a surprise that i was NOT expecting and i was pleased to see that.  It picked things up for me.

What throws me off from fully enjoying this story is that we don’t have a real development of anyone here.  While we were starting to get the sense of development of Zoe in book1 given that she never felt real emotions before, aside from some snippets of Rage or potential lust for Adrian, there’s nothing else there.  There’s also the beginning of development of a new character Xona, yet i feel like it could have been taken further.  Her hatred for Regs (or Ex-Regs) is apparent, and i feel that it’s not til the end that we see her turn a corner and really get into those emotions.

So…i think that this book falls under the same curse of a lot of others…when there’s a trilogy that has a clear beginning and end point (at least i hope since i haven’t read book 3 yet), and book 2 really just is a bridge to get us there, and doesn’t do an amazing job. I’m just hopeful that we’ll get to see things pick up again in the finale since there was hope and a glimmer there at the end of Override of something that could get interesting.  Oh well, can’t LOVE them all now can i?