Review: Generation One

Generation One by Pittacus Lore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A Lorien Legacies sequel series?

A Lorien Legacies sequel series!

My general reaction when they announced this:



And my general reaction having finally finished reading Generation One:



So. The skinny, the nitty-gritty...it looks like ol' Mr. Frey has decided to keep Pittacus Lore's storytelling career going in a slightly different form, one that borrows a bit from the Endgame trilogy in terms of style. Not so much the strange formatting with unindented paragraphs and numbers numbered out like Frey got possessed by Tahereh Mafi, but from the multiple POVs of a very diverse ensemble cast like Frey instead got possessed by Leigh Bardugo. Here we have six main third-person narrators, all Garde. Two of them, we've met in the original series - sonic-manipulating punk Nigel and the troubled, Mako Mori-like Ran. The other four are new to us - the Jekyll and Hyde-ish Caleb, the bold, brash Isabela, Kopano (the first new Garde we meet, who has a Luke Cage-type power combined with a gentle-giant personality) and Taylor, a healer. (Perhaps because she's the white female lead, she's the only one named in the dust-jacket blurb, but then again the original series also liked to focus on one character at a time with each blurb too.)

Then there's the seventh POV, belonging to a villain who wants to kidnap the new Earth Garde and use them for his own ends...and then it's hinted he's got superiors who really are in charge and really want to use the Garde. The villains are fairly diverse too - an Icelander and a Saudi being the main ones, in addition to your standard Bible-thumping white-supremacist human-supremacist American shit-for-brains - but they're pretty damn ruthless. Hell, in their first scene, they steal a boy from an Australian Aboriginal village and massacre the rest of the inhabitants - shades of Kylo Ren here, not to mention some nasty colonialism that reminds me of some of the more disturbing scenes from Cleverman.

This book really takes its time to get going, but when it does, it rockets into the stratosphere as only Pittacus Lore can take us, easily going toe to toe with the original series in terms of action and thrills. It helps that a few of our faves from the original series make comebacks - Dr. Malcolm Goode, "Professor" Nine (who now resembles Man Bun Ken, but I still think he's cool, that lovable assbite), Daniela, the aforementioned Nigel and Ran...and even John, who makes one surprise cameo in all his Superman-esque glory. Though I kinda wish I could've seen Sam, Six, or Seven...but there'll be more books in this series, and more chances for them to return.

Make no mistake - this new series is shaping up to be a more than worthy follow up to The Lorien Legacies. I never expected Generation One to happen, but all praise be to Pittacus Lore and the Book Gods.



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