The Scorpion Rules by Erin Bow
Series: Prisoners of Peace #1
Version: ARC Paperback
Rating: 2 stars
Published: September 22nd 2015
Goodreads Synopsis:
The world is at peace, said the Utterances. And really, if the odd princess has a hard day, is that too much to ask?
Greta is a duchess and crown princess—and a hostage to peace. This is how the game is played: if you want to rule, you must give one of your children as a hostage. Go to war and your hostage dies.
Greta will be free if she can survive until her eighteenth birthday. Until then she lives in the Precepture school with the daughters and sons of the world’s leaders. Like them, she is taught to obey the machines that control their lives. Like them, she is prepared to die with dignity, if she must. But everything changes when a new hostage arrives. Elián is a boy who refuses to play by the rules, a boy who defies everything Greta has ever been taught. And he opens Greta’s eyes to the brutality of the system they live under—and to her own power.
As Greta and Elián watch their nations tip closer to war, Greta becomes a target in a new kind of game. A game that will end up killing them both—unless she can find a way to break all the rules.
Goats - the shapers of history.
That, my friends, is what most of the book is made up of. Goats. Not that I don't like goats, but it says a lot if there was more goat mentioning that say, actual character development.
Conceptually, this story sounds really cool. For the first chapter, I was reeled in. Children of rulers taken as hostages and killed if their country enters a war? AI's running the world? Count me in. It's something different from the other dystopia novels I've read.
But it wasn't executed the way I hoped. There's Greta, our main character and one of the seven hostages being held in the Prefecture. There's Xie, another hostage and one of Greta's love interests. When their friend Sidney gets killed by the Swan Riders, who do the killing of hostages when countries declare war, Elian comes in his place, as the hostage of the newly formed kingdom of Cumberland. Elian is rebellious when Greta is obedient - but the two of them learn much from each other.
