Title Want Author Cindy Pon Cover Art --- Publisher Simon Schuster - 2017 First Printing Simon Schuster - 2017
	Title Ruse Author Cindy Pon Cover Art --- Publisher --- First Printing ---
	Category Dystopia Warnings None Main Characters Jason Zhou, Daiyu, Victor, Lingyi, Iris, Arun Main Elements Dystopia Website cindypon.com

Want

Often I wait till I finish a series, especially a short one, until I've read all the books, and the write the review. But in this case, my library doesn't have the second book (or the first for that matter, it was briefly available for free on the Simon Shuster website), but this book works pretty well as a standalone too. And while I enjoyed it enough to spend my time reading it, I didn't enjoy it enough to run out and buy it.

The first interesting aspect is that it takes place entirely in Taipei, and the cast is multi-cultural. The city is encased in a toxic smog, though the poor are affected far more than the rich, even the rich lose out. If you live in a city where the smog is so thick that the sky is perptually brown, even if you are rich enough to own a fancy body suit with fresh air cycling through it so you don't need to suck the toxic sludge into your lungs, the sky remains an ugly brown. As in a Nature of Things documentary I watched just a day after I finished this book, it was reporting on how bad the air quality is in New Delhi, they pointed out didn't matter if you were rich or poor, you all breath the same air (at least until we invent those suits). Pon describes this climate disaster very well. We are given a scene where Daiyou is showing Zhou some underwater scenes, then she turns it off sadly and says that even the rich can't experience this anymore, the animals are now extinct. One can try to live in an ivory tower but what do you do when the elephants are gone?

Our protagonists are a group of "meis", people who have nothing. And they want to take on the "yous", those who have everything. An ecclectic group, we mainly follow Zhou, who tries to infiltrate you society. That's where things sort of didn't work for me, he got everything he needed too easily, even when later explained he wasn't without help. On the other hand, I did like the grey areas, where all the meis weren't necessarily saintly victims, and all the yous weren't necessarily cruel despots (in fact the vast majority were merely ignorant, not cruel).

And then toss in a flu pandemic (for which a cure is found in...days? hard to believe considering what we just went through with COVID, but hey, the book takes place in the future, and was written pre-COVID), whose purpose is to increase sales of those protective suits.

Which brings us to the bad guy, Jin...he was, well, a little too bad? I mean there is a greedy businessman, and then there is releasing an 80% death rate flu just so you could sell more product, a pandemic being something hard to control and just as likely to kill your own "people" (ie. the rich) as anyone else. As far as I could tell the rich weren't being provided a vaccine/antidote either, not even his daughter. There wasn't anything that guy wouldn't sacrifice for a quick buck.

The romance worked well enough, it wasn't insta-love and neither half of the pairing was a "bad boy" that needed to be saved by the girl who "wasn't good enough"...maybe because this story is written from a male POV. In fact I liked that aspect, a lot of YA books are directed at girls and have to have "strong heroines" or whatever, but boys need books with male leads too (and why can't girls read some of those from time to time too!) but with strong female characters around him. Iris is a strange but kick-ass ninja thief. Lingyi is the hacker. Daiyou is the rich girl who is more than she seems. Zhou is actually not all that special (and hey a YA book where there are no "destinies" or special snowflakes! which somehow seems a pre-requiste when the protagonist is female, like she can't just be plain Jane and still be core to a novel's plot), he felt quite real in fact, just a guy who'd like to do good in a world set up to prevent him from doing so.

Now that I have thought through the review, I guess I liked it more than I thought. But while I love various aspects of it, it just didn't grab me as being entirely special. Maybe because this is the second or third time Simon & Shuster is doing a dystopia themed month, I'm getting a little tired of them. Poor kid taking on evil corporation/government is a pretty common plot these days. While there was the location and characters to spice it up a bit, it still failed to stand out as something truly unique. But then I'm more a fantasy than SF fan anyway so a lot of SF tends to blend into each other for me.