Review: The Breaking Light

The Breaking Light by Heather Hansen

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

I got this book as part of Amazon’s Kindle First Reads where Prime members get a free ebook from a selection of ebooks each month

I didn’t like this book for 2 reasons:

1. It’s derivative in all the ways that don’t work for me. It’s got a Fritz Lang Metropolis setup that I’ve seen done a million times before from books like Red Rising to a half dozen anime. It tries to draw lots of parallels to Romeo and Juliet, but in that play, the families are equals. Here our Juliet is a poor girl in a gang and our Romeo is a rich boy who is trying to fight the city’s corruption. It IS a YA book. Maybe it works better for young folk who don’t know where the book cribs from.

2. This book breaks the rule of having each book (or AT LEAST the first book) in a series have a mini-arc that resolves. Nothing is resolved at the end of this book. (view spoiler)[Well, the boy and girl are together and presumably she doesn’t die of her blood loss between books 1 and 2 (hide spoiler)] Also our big plot twist turns out to be a bit of a deus ex machina.

This book might work for you, but it definitely doesn’t do it for me.

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