Review: Nemesis

Nemesis by Brendan Reichs
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Brendan Reichs is back and better than ever, my friends. This book, so beloved by pretty much the entire YA Cool Kids' Table (Aveyard, Riggs, Garcia, and so many more), is the start of a new action-packed sci-fi/supernatural series, outdoing Reichs' previous work on the Virals series by a long shot. Sure, this book does have its flaws - it takes a while to get the story started, and the characters make surprisingly frequent use of such current slang that the book will already look pretty dated by 2020 - but those flaws are more than made up for by a blistering pace, apocalyptic and cinematic set pieces, and twists and turns all over the place.

My only real issue with Nemesis is that it has just enough surface similarities to my own Red Rain books - namely, the isolated small town setting (Fire Lake, Idaho, as opposed to my Coldfire Creek, California) and Reichs' book and mine both being named for a secret military operation - but hey, the similarities between my book and Reichs' are more like the similarities between, say, Twin Peaks and Wayward Pines. Enough genre differences that it really shouldn't matter...though I might find myself changing a few details in Red Rain eventually.

But I can tell you this much - Nemesis reads like someone threw all my books into a blender, sprinkled in pages of Michael Grant's Gone series for texture, and hit "chop." But trust me when I say that it's better than it sounds. With apologies to all but King's Cage, Nemesis has successfully muscled its way into my Top 5 books of 2017 thus far, and I would be very surprised if it doesn't win a Pinecone Award by the end of the year. (Especially given that Obsidio isn't being released this year, so it stands a better chance that way.)

Really, read this if it bloody kills you.

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