[Spoilers!] The haters are just plain wrong. Yes, the book is post-Hunger Games and Divergent–it’s also post-Maze Runner, but I guess that doesn’t matter since the protagonist is female–however, it’s anything but derivative.
The post-apocalyptic genre of sci fi has been around at least since Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, even if we don’t want to go back to Gilgamesh or Noah’s Ark, so no contemporary author owns that, and Lackey has been putting out great novels for decades. This is no exception.
What made Hunger Games exceptional for me (and I suspect, others), was the insights it gives into modern society: the mindset of tyrants and dictators, as well as of teens and drug users; the role of the media; urban/rural differences, and the relation of the latter to virtually every reality TV show on E!
This book has some of those elements too, but it’s a completely different world, characters and story. The media is used to pacify the masses–ostensibly to keep them safe. The packaging (and editing) of reality is used to meet that end. Joyeux is young and rural, but also has a mix of Eastern and South American philosophies, that make her different. Plus, there’s magical creatures, magicians and hounds.
What I didn’t like was the book’s lack of closure. Joyeux goes onward and upward, but we never really learn why it was necessary, who’s responsible and what their motivations are. It forces you to read the next book, in a way that most books don’t. And I will, but it doesn’t feel great.
Mercedes Lackey’s Hunter
