Frannie Tasker spent her days diving for wrecks in the Grand Bahamas in 1776.  After her mother's death, Frannie is left with her step-father Sewal who abuses her and now wants to take her to be his wife.  Frannie takes an opportunity to escape with a shipwreck that she spots, and assumes the life of a woman aboard who drowned.  There were no survivors of the wreck and everyone believes that Frannie, now assuming the role of Emmaline Coates, is a miracle.  Frannie is swept away upon a British merchant ship on its way to her new home-and war in New York.  Frannie takes upon the task of learning to be a highborn lady who is soon to inherit sharing her secret only with Asa Lane, a rebel patriot being held on the ship.   Frannie plays her role well and three years later is fully accepted as Emmaline and is ready to be married off.  Her chosen suitor, British Lieutenant James Duncan sweeps her off her feet and talks a lot about his role.  Frannie soons finds a way to feel more like herself, as a spy for George Washington known as Agent 355, codename Lady.  

I read Riders by Veronica Rossi to get J.K. Rowling's card. The book is YA and has a teenager as the main character.

I didn't go back and read my review of the first book in this series, but I'm pretty sure whatever I said there probably applies here, too. This is not an impressive dystopia -- it relies on  its love story because the world-building is only so-s0, but unfortunately the love story is only so-so as well. I just don't feel invested in Aria and Perry's relationship, so it was hard to really care when a bit of a love triangle (or love square? It was hard to tell whether there was supposed to be something romancy happening between two of the characters) that developed here, especially since it was more-or-less devoid of any real tension because the other love interest was not fully developed or compelling in any way, although she had the feeling of a character that was created by trying too hard to do something interesting.

There were some moments when Perry just seemed dumb, like in allowing his clanmates to tattoo Aria in a ceremony with the potential to be dangerous even though he knew a bunch of them hated her -- I could have seen the way that would turn out, so why couldn't he? He might be a little too naive to make a good clan leader. There were also parts of this audiobook I had to listen to more than once because I lost interest and then lost the thread of the story; there were other places where that happened and I decided it just wasn't worth it to go back and catch myself up.

This book wasn't horrible, hence the ubiquitous three-star rating, but you won't miss much if you skip it, either. I'm certainly not going to bother reading the final installment in the trilogy.

Around the Year Reading Challenge Item #22: The First Book in a Series

This is pretty much standard fare as far as teen dystopia/post-apocalyptic books go. The world is not particularly groundbreaking: it consists of "dwellers" who live in protective "pods" where all their needs are provided for but boredom leads them to live out most of their lives within virtual worlds, and the "outsiders," tribal people who have managed to survive and evolve on the "outside" after some sort of environmental devastation and whom the dwellers see as "savages."

Of course, a dweller and an outsider encounter one another, and, of course, the experience alters both of them. And since this is a teen book, they're also both hot and find themselves attracted to each other.

Although this book probably never had much hope of being anything more than mediocre, without the nauseating/cheesy romance subplot it may have squeaked by with a four-star rating. Unfortunately, the romance plot becomes more prominent as the book goes on, including one section where I almost had to double check that I wasn't reading Twilight. The "savage" boy fulfills all the typical "wild man" fantasies you would expect -- there is something dangerous and irresistibly feral about him, he's the strong silent type, etc., whereas the girl is beautiful with a lovely voice, and she apparently smells like violets (and we are never allowed to forget that she smells like violets. The male lead has an acutely developed sense of smell, so he can smell people's individual scents as well as their "moods," and he's always noticing Arya's "violet" smell. The first time he notices it is also the first time she gets her period, and I was like, wtf? Why doesn't he smell BLOOD? I wish *I* smelled like violets when I was menstruating.)

The science in this book is also a little squishy, which would be less annoying if it didn't try to come across as so authoritative at times. There are a lot of convenient fixes because it's clear the author just wants to get back to the steamy scenes (lest this seem especially enticing, all the sex happens "off-screen.") Plot threads seemed to be picked up and then abandoned. Arya gets her first period, is unaware of what it is, and yet we never learn how she copes with it thereafter or when it ends; a period is a big enough deal the first time you get it when you DO know what it is, and it seemed to be disregarded a little too easily for a dweller girl who was menstruating for the first time on the outside and had no one to really talk to about what was happening, how long it would last, what she should do about it, etc. Perhaps other plot threads were not abandoned, but I daydreamed and just lost track of them.

Characters are fairly one-dimensional, more suited to the screen than the page. But despite all of that, this book did hold my interest well enough; it was an easy, light read; and it made some interesting commentary on humans' tendencies toward escapism and the potential danger therein. I wish it would have spent more time on that aspect of the story. I found the "realms" to be believable, and I wanted to know more about this world, such as what the aether actually WAS, and what had happened in "The Unity," which is presumably when the humans built the pods and the separate populations of dwellers and outsiders arose.

If you can't get enough teen dystopia, this book is readable enough -- it's rated fairly high on Goodreads, so others must have found more to like than I did. But if you're looking to read only the best in an overcrowded genre, this isn't it.