Tag Archives: Imposters

Review: Youngbloods (Imposters #4) by Scott Westerfeld

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Title: Youngbloods
Author: Scott Westerfeld
Publisher/Year:  Scholastic Inc 4/5/22
Length:  432 pages
Series: Imposters #4

Overview

IT’S TIME TO

COME OUT OF HIDING

Frey has spent her life in a family of deceivers, a stand-in for her sister, manipulated at her father’s command. Free from them at last, she is finding her own voice — and using it to question everything her family stood for.

Tally was once the most famous rebel in the world. But for over a decade, she’s kept to the shadows, allowing her myth to grow even as she receded. Now she sees that the revolution she led has not created a stable world. Freedom, she observes, has a way of destroying things.

As the world is propelled further into conflict and conspiracy, Frey and Tally join forces to put a check on the people in power, while still trying to understand their own power and where it belongs.

My Thoughts

It’s been a minute since we’ve been with this series but it’s so easy to slip back into the series. Getting back into the world of Tally and Frey really leads us down an exciting path, and throughout this fourth book, we don’t know who to trust.

The journey here is one to watch how Frey tries to get over the loss of Col, the one person that she loved, knowing that it was her twin sister who murdered him. Frey doesn’t know who to trust since she knows that her sister isn’t loyal and is moral missing, so she has to tread carefully.

We get to watch the relationships grow with the Youngbloods and all the other cliques that were once part of the city – especially now that laws and dust aren’t a thing, an everyone’s got the chance to reinvent themselves. It’s a reliance on some of those old ‘friends’ that gets us through some of the trials in this storyline.

We see a ‘come to terms’ between Boss X and Frey and the realization that they are more similar than they thought, but have the same scars to get through life which make things harder. These similarities make it that much harder to predict what the future will hold with them since the dynamic is tough.

There’s a quest to uncover an destroy the old dust files that Frey/Rafi’s father had saved – knowing that there’s a lot there that the AI of other nations can use against them. Part of the issue of course is that they are radioactive so it’s harder to get to, and once they discover the hiding place, they learn that they’re not the only ones on this same quest. just for different motives.

Rarfi has made a trade, a deal with another nation without thinking through the repercussions and that means that we’re on the backfoot throughout the quest to save the world.and then when we realize that she perhaps made deals with multiple people, well that means that we have even more to worry about.

Even within the Youngbloods we see that there’s a power struggle on who’s making the right choices for them and for mankind that we don’t know who’s going to be on the right side of things.

There’s strife, stress, fear, angst….everything with the exception of romance since that’s been killed. But…all in all a great next chapter in their journey and in this series. Enjoy!

Review: Mirror’s Edge (Imposters #3) by Scott Westerfeld

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Title: Mirror’s Edge
Author:  Scott Westerfeld
Publisher/Year:  Scholastic 4/6/21
Length:  352 Pages
Series: Imposters #3

Overview

The danger rises and the deception grows in the heart-stopping third book in the New York Times bestselling Impostors series!

Frey’s return to the city of her birth isn’t going to be an easy one. She and her love Col must surge on new faces and bodies in order to infiltrate Shreve by dropping from the sky and landing undetected.

Frey’s sister Rafi — no longer a twin in features, but still a twin by birth — is the wild card. Are the sisters on the same side . . . or are they playing to their own agendas? If their father is deposed from Shreve, who will take control? And what other forces may be waiting in the wings?

My Thoughts

Here we are, back in the insanely engrossing world of the Uglies, where the past never truly led us in the right direction, and the semi truths of today aren’t what they seem. Everything that Frey thought she knew about Rafi and her father isn’t the truth, and that makes every move they make from here on out a question mark. The mission that this story takes us on is multi-pronged. There’s the need to rescue Boss X from the clutches of Schreve, and we don’t know what they will be up against. Frey goes under the knife with Col and several others to camo themselves from the nano dust in the city- creating new identifies for themselves in order ot sneak in, save X, destroy Shreve and hopefully free the city. The republic of Diego is in on this as well partially because that’s where the surg is happening and partially because the end game is for Diego to put Frey in control of Shreve and make the world a better place. The question though is are all the tests and prodding for the benefit of Frey, Shreve, Rafi or something else entirely.

The journey takes us under the radar into Shreve, under ground, where crims reveal secrets to Frey about her home city that she had no idea about. She’s introduced to cliques who may be able to set diversions so they can sneak into the high security prison where X is held, but since these are unknowns to the crew and rebels, we don’t know what’s the benefit and real truth here. Everyone has their own motivation and again we’re in a place where we don’t know who we can trust.

There’s eerie construction happening and we quickly uncover that there are radioactive deposits that Frey and Rafi’s father is looking to dig up in order to create a nuclear weapon. There’s intelligence that tells us that he’s stockpiled it in his tower meaning that they can’t blow him up with out destroying the city. So we’re at an impasse of sorts.

Relationships are put to the test, identities are uncovered and mysteries still hold strong where we don’t know what’s real, what’s illusion and what’s on the allied side.

Many lives are lost, and may twists takes us down a path where we realize that if you can’t fight for yourself, you can’t trust someone else to do it. We watch Rafi take Frey’s persona, her courage and her mannerisms and use them for her own benefit, yet again reminding us that she’s not to be trusted and that she’s only motivated by her own sense of power. We don’t know what that means for the rest of this story, since she’s done something yet again at the end of this installment that raises flags and questions that are impossible to answer.

We learned early on in this series of a death of a family member that was unknown at the time, and that’s been used against Frey and Rafi throughout the first three installments. We have a death of a favorite that was caused at the hands of someone that we were wrong to trust, changing the trajectory for our mains going into book four. We also find ourselves back in Paz at the end of this story, meeting with at least one if not two unexpected characters in the hopes that we can change the future for the better.

In my review for book two, I was left with some many philosophical questions – but in this book, it’s not so much a deep seeking question that I have but rather will we ever live in a time where over-baring power isn’t the only motivation? Where you always have to put someone else down in order to gain power, authority, money, all that comes with being in charge? We’ve seen that there’s a need and hunger for some people to lead, but there are also some who do it with a balance of respect. Sadly, that’s not the case in this story for some of the twisted paths we go down. There’s too much being sacrificed, and I wonder what that means should this story really transpire in the future. I can’t wait until book four now, and I hate how our author does this to me. Leaves me hanging on a cliff, and I have to wait far far too long for the next installment. oh well. Enjoy!

Review: Shatter City (Imposters #2) by Scott Westerfeld

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Title: Shatter City
Author:  Scott Westerfeld
Publisher/Year:  Scholastic Inc 9/17/19
Length:  331 Pages
Series:  Imposters #2

Overview

When the world sees Frey, they think they see her twin sister Rafi. Frey was raised to be Rafi’s double, and now she’s taken on the role . . . without anyone else knowing. 

Her goal? To destroy the forces that created her.

But with the world watching and a rebellion rising, Frey is forced into a detour. Suddenly she is stranded on her own in Paz, a city where many of the citizens attempt to regulate their emotions through an interface on their arms. Paz is an easy place to get lost . . . and also an easy place to lose yourself. 

As the city comes under a catastrophic attack, Frey must leave the shadows and enter the chaos of warfare – because there is no other way for her to find her missing sister and have her revenge against her murderous father.

My Thoughts

It’s been a while since we’ve been in this series but this second book gives us all the feels you could hope for. (definitely an overused phrase in this story though). Anyhow, like the summary says, we are thrown right back into the middle of a war – where Rafi and Frey are against their father because all he has in mind is to destroy the world for motives unknown aside from a need for power.

When we left off, Frey traded places with Rafi in the hopes of saving her love Col, and well, we know how that turned out. The bomb collar was switched from one sister to the other, meaning that identities had to be faked yet again. Frey at least had the chance to be with Col in these unusual circumstances, all while trying to figure out how they could both get out unscathed. Thankfully, Col has his allies on call and they were able to devise a plan to get them out and hopefully on the road to freedom.

The challenge here is that Frey is on the hunt for Rafi since her entire life she was raised to protect her sister. She learns that her sister is in a city called Paz, the next target for their father, both for the notion that Rafi is there but also because Paz is a city that believes in true freedom and doesn’t conscribe to the notion of dust or spying. It’s truly free. Their father threatens devastation that no one can fathom, a Rusty weapon that appears like natural destruction and then invasion.

What Frey finds when she gets there is a mess. She learns that Rafi is gone and that she’s left everything to Frey in the meantime. she’s set up an apartment, made sure she’s taken care of, but the reasoning behind it is still a semi mystery to Frey.

That’s really what a lot of this story is about. There are semi truths or incomplete pieces of information that everyone’s working with and we don’t yet know what’s intentional, what’s accidental and what the end result here could be.

There’s so much going on that i don’t know where to start otherwise. We spend time in Paz trying to broadcast that their father is evil and is trying to take over the world, yet he’s a step ahead and while he’s destroyed the city, he appears to be the first to help build it back up. There’s a secret there that they don’t yet know the motivation behind, and when we do figure it out, there’s no surprise.

Then there’s the issue of Rafi being out in the Wild, with rebels and we don’t know what her end game is. Trying to locate her gets Frey caught by a neighboring city and held captive in the hopes of securing a stronger network of allies. When she’s freed by Col and his crew, we start to see the story speed up.

there are Easter Eggs throughout this story that trigger questions. The Paz AI tells Frey about something called ‘Iron Mountain’ but there’s no context to what it is ,where it is and what it will do. When we get to the wilds, we learn that a few people have deeper insight and it could be a key to unlocking a lot of information.

Then there’s a hint that someone that the girls know of may be in the rebels, and that there’s a key link there to Rafi’s focus on being out there. She has heard rumors and if they are true then there may be hope. The way that this specific story line plays out is so shocking though that i’m glad i assumed wrong for the bulk of the time.

We are left at a point of hope, yet a point of instability. There’s no clear direction on who will win, if their father can be bested and what that will mean to the world. Relationships continue to grow and build, and there’s something solid and sweet about each friendship and romance. The depth that we get to see psychologically with everyone is really intense as well and that’s a new feature to all of the stories that i’ve read by our amazing author.

There’s an interesting idea here that we get throughout both the Uglies and the Imposters series. Originally when you read Uglies, you see that people are never happy with what they have naturally and as a result, they surgically change or enhance everything that’s possible to change about themselves. What we learned there is that it’s not always better and sometimes tech makes things worse. What we have in this series is a tease of that since most of the modifications are now illegal, with only a few Specials remaining for example, but there’s such fear and mis information on what it was that led to the need for Surg. There’s fear of invaded privacy and that you’re never allowed to be free. It makes you wonder if this is going to be our future. The way that we enhance ourselves and the way that we allow innovative technology to watch all of our activities and even help to make life easier…..just a philosophical question today about what’s good and right and worth the stress. Ponder away until we get book 3. Enjoy!

Review: Imposters (Imposters #1) by Scott Westerfeld

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Title: Imposters
Author:  Scott Westerfeld
Publisher/Year:  Scholastic 9/11/18
Length:   289 Pages
Series:  Imposters #1

Overview

Deception. Risk. Betrayal. Redemption. Master storyteller Scott Westerfeld is at the top of his game, and back to his most famous realm. A New York Times bestseller.

Frey and Rafi are inseparable . . . two edges of the same knife. But only one of them is ever seen in public.

Frey is Rafi’s twin sister-and her body double. Their powerful father has many enemies, and the world has grown dangerous as the old order falls apart. So while Rafi was raised to be the perfect daughter, Frey has been taught to kill. Her only purpose is to protect her sister, to sacrifice herself for Rafi if she must. 

When her father sends Frey in Rafi’s place as collateral in a precarious deal, she becomes the perfect impostor. But Col, the son of a rival leader, is getting close enough to spot the killer inside her . . . . 

My Thoughts

Seeing the cover of this story brings me back to a great time when I read the series that preceded this one – The Uglies. That story was ahead of it’s time with all the body mods that were possible, the reason for it, the throwback to Rusties society (which is really our time), and now we’re sort of back in it again.

Tally Youngblood was the main character in that series -a girl who did everything that she could to change how people thought about themselves and the world. She started a rebellion, and now we’re back in a time when people are primed for another rebellion, and could use her reappearance but when that doesn’t seem likely, they use her spirit.

As the summary says, Rafia and Frey are twins, half an hour apart, but worlds apart in reality. Rafia is the favorite, the one who’s meant to be the ruler and Frey is the bodyguard and the throw away. Of course though, if we haven’t learned anything in reading these types of stories – it’s always the Throw Away that has the most potential. And that’s where this story takes us.

Frey is traded to a neighboring ruling family as collateral so their father can get a hold of metal which he so desperately wants. The intention is that Frey will impersonate Rafia while she’s there so that he can get what he wants and if something goes wrong, well, then he’s only lost the spare. not the heir.

Giving Frey this kind of freedom, even though she’s essentially a prisoner, well, it’s opening her world up more than anyone could have hoped. She befriends the eldest son to the ruling family and building more than just a close friendship with him. But if Rafia isn’t what she seems, then what’s to say that Col is what he seems?

From the beginning, we’re pulled into this story from an emotional string, and then we’re kept engaged with the hope that these teens can make the world a better place. Our main characters know that how their parents rule and have raised them isn’t necessarily the best way and when they come to terms that they can be powerful as well, in a positive way, then the story explodes.

In addition to Frey and Rafia, and Col even, we have a few additional characters that truly lend good shape to the story. There’s Zura who’s a Special (if you read the other series, you would know that Specials have been modified to be military grade – stronger, faster, smarter etc). She’s proven to be incredibly helpful and perhaps one of the last remaining Victorian House Guard Specials to survive. There’s also Teo who is Col’s younger brother and a boy who’s got an interesting role in the story that we don’t fully know yet. He’s at a private boarding school in Europe when all hell breaks loose and then he goes missing and we can’t wait to see how that plays out. There’s also Col’s friend Yandre who seems to have family connections to the Rebels and we can only guess that the Rebels will be necessary (and perhaps will spawn a pop up by Tally).

What our author does well yet again is paint a picture on how societies truly divided themselves once the Rusties went away and new tech became the norm. People became far more reliant on newer and better technology to make things not only beautiful, but automated and controlled by AI etc. When that happens, as we saw in the Uglies series, people become far too reliant on things outside of themselves and society crumbles.

We go on a roller coaster with this story. Feeling heartbroken for the sisters when they are torn apart, feeling hope for Frey because she gets a chance to be someone else, and then dealing with angst and anxiety when a war breaks out and friends and loved ones are killed or torn apart. We’re left in a very precarious place at the end of this story – where one sister is forced to make a decision that can truly ruin the other one, where enemies are capturing people left and right and people are still missing. there’s almost no closure at the end of this first installment to this spin off series and that’s something that i both love and hate because i need to know more – NOW. So, on that note, i’m going to stalk Mr Westerfeld’s page to find out when the 2nd book is coming out and i’ll be back later! Enjoy!