Review: Icon and Inferno

Icon and Inferno by Marie Lu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

OLD PINECONE GENERAL'S WARNING: Any resemblance in this book to real life events is entirely coincidental, the book having come out several weeks before the real-world events that so eerily imitated it.

The two books of this latest series from Marie Lu, this YA/NA borderline action thriller with just a touch of sci-fi - now very clearly in the futuristic world of the Lu-niverse, with Emika Chen and Warcross getting some cameos, and clarifying that Warcross really was a lot less further out in the future than I thought - well, they're both actually pretty good standalone stories for the most part. Aside from this book giving Winter and Sydney a lot of trauma to work through from their last mission, and how it went so badly awry after a huge mid-book twist or two in Stars and Smoke.

Now, we're on to a book about the toxicity of bad romance, and yet, even the good romance, the pairing that we're meant to ship, is bogged down by how much circumstance dictates Sydney and Winter really can't be together, since she's a secret agent and he's a superstar. But now we get to see just how bad their love lives have gone in the past, with those chickens coming home to roost - the utterly despisable Gavi Ginsburg insinuating her way back into Winter's life, and Sydney's ex, now a rogue agent code named "the Arsonist," roaring back from obscurity to take down Panacea at all costs. Including the heads of a few heads of state, if necessary.

I'll give this one a 3.5 rounded up to a 4 because while Winter's still my clear fave of the two core characters, Sydney, who was underdeveloped in the first book, shines a lot more this time around. I kinda expected that Lu would all but drop the whole "unspecified respiratory illness" angle of Sydney's character because it was so thinly sketched as to come off inconsequential, but she really shows her asskicking credentials but good as she fights to overcome the traumas of her whole life. As for Winter, well, dude's got enough problems without having to deal with the threat of a supposed tell-all biography - entirely unauthorized, of course - and then Gavi Ginsburg reappears in his hotel room. Coincidence? Methinks not, but you'd be surprised.

As is pretty common in Lu's work, though, one theme remains clear - this series isn't a traditional "happily ever after" romance, because life just doesn't find that way sometimes. And yet, there's always that glimmer of hope in the end.

Though the book ends with hints that the adventures could continue, it seems like Lu is once again riding the duology train with this one, so now it's ave atque vale to Sydney and Winter.

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