10 January 2015

Review: Seeker


Seeker
Seeker by Arwen Elys Dayton

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



On one hand, it's great to see a neat modern sci-fi/fantasy hybrid for the YA set. On the other, with a handful of unnecessarily weird sexually-charged scenes that don't match up with the book and an ending that more peters toward a sequel than moves full-blast into the next book, this ends up being just a good, interesting read as opposed to the great one with excellent promise I thought it was about a fifth of the way in.

The book basically follows three teens training to be "Seekers," some of the last in their lines. There's history behind the Seekers, a lot of mystery, and daggers seemingly infused with magical energy of some sort that are of great power and value. This, of course, tears families apart, and while the first bit of the book is largely about this fallout, the second part (which is a more modern Hong Kong tale) strives to try and put the story back together. Oftentimes strange (in a good way) and epic feeling, the story keeps running along these lines through the end.

I do wish the climax was more climactic. The book is violent, but not exploitatively so. The couple of questionable scenes don't even seem to fit in with the writing style of the book, so I don't know why it's there, especially given how basically chaste the book is in comparison. There's a lot of early reviews saying this is like The Hunger Games or Game of Thrones, but it's really more like The Testing with familial intrigue mixed in.

Again, very good, could be great if it were fixed up in a few places. I'll look out for the sequel, but this is probably closer to a 3.5 for me.



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