Review: Dove Exiled

Dove Exiled by Karen Bao
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Taking the action down to Earth - literally - does this second book in Karen Bao's kick-ass trilogy a great service. It allows her to expand the world-building by showing us a little more of what the world is like 300 years into the future, when the continents are pretty much all either water-damaged or otherwise uninhabitable and all the remaining territory is either small islands full of natural resources, or deadly floating cities that try to capture everything else. And the cities of Pacifia and Battery Bay don't just float, either - they move around. You can see one of those moving floating cities bearing down behind Phaet and Wes on the cover, and it looks pretty scary...

Another bonus to this book is how sharply critical of humanity it is. Not just Western civilization and capitalism, but communism as well. There's even a point made of Phaet's days in Lunar school, when her teachers condemned both those extremes of the economic spectrum. And while the two floating superpowers try to gobble up as much of Earth as they can, up on the Moon, there's sinister alliances happening, and even a storyline of election fraud that resonates so much more strongly now after Russia rigged our election last year.

Really, my only complaint about this book is that it's too short. But it's got me raring to get my hands on a copy of the third (and, I believe, final) book ASAP.

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