Review: Invictus

Invictus by Ryan Graudin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I think this one's my favorite Ryan Graudin book yet. More connectable than The Walled City and more expansive in its historical and temporal scope than the Wolf by Wolf duology, it's also the most complex book I've seen Graudin give us. Not for nothing does it earn the comparison to Fringe, and also perhaps to A Thousand Pieces of You, but all condensed into a single story. Really, I'm hashing pissed this is only a standalone.

Perhaps the biggest point of contention for me was Graudin's use of futuristic swears. Some of them, like the aforementioned "hash" and "haze" as F-word substitutes, made a certain amount of sense. Characters making it a game of swearing in as many languages as they could was, for me, tons of fun. But then there was the constant use of "shazm," which was where Graudin's phony-swearing skills kinda deserted her. I think she was trying to go for something that sounded like a cross between Glader-speak and the mangled, kid-friendly swears of Dan Schneider's Nick Verse, particularly in the iCarly and Victorious days, but there's a reason why the Maze Runner movies largely did away with most of the Glader swears anyway.

Where Graudin really shines here, though, is plot and characters, both of which she crafts with complexity and intricacy the likes of which aren't seen as often as they should be in YA. Eliot is gonna get a lot of fans for sure because of her sheer deadliness, but the rest of the core cast are all a bunch of awe and some dorks even as they're hardened time heisters whom the system's wronged in some way or another. And while the story is rooted in the future, the world both past and present (relative to us) still impacts it and the people within quite strongly.

I eagerly await whatever Graudin gives us next, but again, I'm not happy it won't be Invictus 2.0 in any form.

And one more thing - who else was reminded of the opening to J.J. Abrams' 2009 Star Trek movie with the prologue?

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