Things are not going well for Emika Chen. A bounty hunter in an obsessively digital world, Emika is days away from being evicted from her run-down apartment with no hope of making enough money. Desperate, she decides to hack into Warcross, the immersive virtual reality game that has overtaken the world. Emika’s hack works, to a point. Unfortunately, during the heist, she also glitches into the International Warcross Championship in front of billions of viewers. Emika is convinced she’s going to spend the rest of her life in jail, but then she receives a call from the mysterious (and ridiculously wealthy) creator of Warcross, Hideo Tanaka. He offers Emika a chance to erase her debts and snag the biggest bounty of her life by chasing down a security threat to Warcross. But what Emika uncovers goes beyond the security of an online game.
Taking obvious cues from Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One and postmodern tech thrillers, Marie Lu presents an exciting, immersive world with interesting and developed characters the reader will care about. While definitely a can’t-miss for fans of Lu’s Young Elites series, Warcross offers something for readers across all genres.
This article was originally published in the September 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
