Title Riders Author Veronica Rossi Cover Art Hugh Syme Publisher Tor Teen - 2016 First Printing Tor Teen - 2016
	Title Seeker Author Veronica Rossi Cover Art Publisher First Printing
	Category Apocalypse Warnings None Main Characters Gideon, Daryn, Sebastian, Jode, Marcus, Samreal Main Elements Demons Website veronicarossi.com

Riders

I had a bookclub challenge where I had to read an "Apocalyptic" SFF book, note that it wasn't Post-Apocalyptic either. And since I was doing a gods/angels/demons reading theme this year I figured, someone must have written something about the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In fact, there weren't that many, and those that were, were even harder to find. But my library had Riders and it sounded interesting, with the main character being War.

First reaction was wow, a recent young adult novel written by a woman where the main character is male. Now don't get me wrong, we need strong female leads in YA lit, but it's nice if all the new books weren't all female-centric too, after all fair is fair, we should have a little of both, and we do get both in this book, it's just Gideon is the narrator. And perhaps because the narrator is male, the romance wasn't all angsty, maybe guys just don't worry as much if they are "good enough" for the girl, and you don't have the "falling for the bad girl" syndrome either. No love triangle either. In fact the romance part was pretty tame.

The book is told in an interesting way, it starts really at the end, with Gideon being interrogated by some mysterious military organization and telling his tale. How he started off a young guy that just wanted to walk in his father's Ranger footsteps, but ends up dying while still in training...the coming back to life with this weird cuff on his wrist, a surprising ability to heal...and oh, there's the crazy fire horse that keeps trying to kill him...

I was surprised but I enjoyed all the characters, I thought it was little silly that 3 out of 4 riders were all located in one part of the U.S. but then writers have the right to center their stories where they think their target audience is, spicing it up a bit with a trip to Italy (to pick up a Brit...) They were multi-racial, but you'd think that people like this would also pop up around the world, after all the U.S. isn't three-quarters of the world. It was convenient such they could just drive around to pick up the first three, barely had to cross state lines. But just the same, there was a nice variety of personalities amongst the riders and there were those that were easy to get along with and there were those that...weren't, Gideon himself being on of the latter. I guess if your superpower is anger, you can't be all happy and cheerful all the time.

The horses were wonderfully imagined though, I don't want to go into too much detail, need to read Rossi's words for yourself, but she made them truly beautiful, strange, magical and powerful. And the interactions between the riders, many who had never been close to a horse before, was wonderful too. My favorite part was when they started training with the horses. Of course they each had weapons too, Conquest's arrows were pretty useful, Famine's scales...not really a weapon when you think about it, though at a stretch it kind works?

As for the apocalypse part...I wasn't really feeling it? The bad guys just seemed like any other bad guys in other YA fantasy novels (except Alevar whom I kind liked actually), I wasn't sitting on the edge of my chair waiting for the world to end. Maybe because it wasn't actually the real apocalypse, these four guys were just being the temporary embodiements of the Four Horsemen, but they weren't in fact the true...being? Guess you could say they were tapping into the powers without becoming actual divine beings, the powers themselves were elsewhere still sealed.

Now the downside. I've hit this with Tor Teen books before, sometimes a book gets published, or at least claimed to have been published, but is impossible to find anywhere. No library I could access had the second book though they had the first. It is out of print so I cannot buy it. And darn it, I enjoyed it enough to want to see how it all ends.