Vortex - SJ Kincaid

 

S. J. Kincaid has created a fascinating dystopian world for Insignia, her futuristic science-fiction adventure series perfect for fans of Ender's Game. Earth is in the middle of WWIII, a war to determine which governments and corporations will control the resources of the solar system.

 

Teen Tom Raines grew up with nothing—some days without even a roof over his head. Then his exceptional gaming skills earned him a spot in the Intrasolar Forces, the country's elite military training program, and his life completely changed.

 

Now in Vortex, the second book in the series, Tom discovers that the Pentagonal Spire, where he and his friends are being trained as superhuman weapons, is filled with corruption. He is asked to betray his friends—the first real friends he's ever had—for the sake of his country.

 

Will he sacrifice his new life to do what he believes is right?

So I recently read this book called Insignia by SJ Kincaid, and I loved it sooo much that I checked out the sequel, Vortex, from the library and read it in like, a day. I love this writer SO MUCH! So much, in fact, that I'm willing to download a Kindle app to my computer so I can read the prequel novella, Allies.

But that's not what this review is about. This review is about Vortex! Very rarely does an author maintain the same level of epic with her second book that he/she began with their first, but SJ Kincaid did it! Tom is now fifteen, not fourteen, but he still has that adorkable mid-teenage-boy-ness to him that I love. He's on his way to graduating from the Plebe Class of the Combatant Training Facility (basically the freshmen) to becoming a middle-classman. Progress is being made with his training and everything's great…

Except that some of the things Tom has done in book one are now coming back to bite him. See, I love it when authors take a character's actions and then actually bring down realistic consequences for that action. Not because I don't like the character, but because I get tired of characters in books who do dumb things—either on purpose or by accident—and then don't realize that actions have actual consequences. One of the big themes of this book is that Tom is beginning to realize that.

1 - He has to fix a ruined friendship/romance with the girl he loves.

2 - He has to get sponsors in order to move up to the rank he wants.

3 - He has to deal with new enemies wearing the masks of friendship and try to figure out just what his current enemies are willing to do to get back at him.

4 - And he's not done training yet, either. =)

Now that Tom has graduated from Plebe Class to level one of Middle Company, he has new things to worry about. Passing his classes isn't the be-all/end-all of his world anymore. Now, if he wants to become a Combatant (which he does), he needs to graduate to CamCo—Camelot Company, the best of the best, and the only trainees who become actual combatants. Everyone else gets other jobs, like with the military and stuff. He doesn’t want that. But in order to be a part of CamCo, he also needs sponsors—one of the major plotlines of this book. And in order to get sponsors, Tom has to learn how to schmooze people.

Just to warn you, this review is full of SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS!!

So, Tom doesn't want to schmooze people. Why? Because he's fifteen, not naturally manipulative, and doesn’t want to sacrifice his dignity and pride by being polite to people he would rather punch in the face. Thing is, as the reader, I can totally sympathize with that! While at the same time, I'm busy begging him to just suck it up one time so he can get a sponsor. It's nice to have a character I can totally root for without reservations. I'm in the middle of another book right now where I'm having reservations about cheering for them and I hate that. But I gotta admire a kid who's so "skilled" that he manages to tick off every single possible sponsor out there within an hour of meeting each of them. Lol!

Of course all five or six of them are basically horrible people, rich CEO types who look down on everyone, and Tom's such an idealist he can't possibly condone the thought of working with them. Like, one lady is the CEO of a company that has overseas factories and condones those horrible conditions where workers are beaten, get paid fifty cents an hour, get no breaks, no air conditioning or heat in the buildings, etc. Being fifteen and having a temper, he tells her everyone in power in her company should throw a party and then go blow themselves up.

That doesn’t end well. Sigh.

The only time Tom's pride-thing gets annoying (it's only one time) is when he meets this oil sheik or whatever and refuses to bow to him. I'm like, "Okay, I get it, you don't want to bow to someone because you don't believe they're superior to you. I get it. Really. Except one thing—they ARE superior to you! They have more money, more authority, and they can make or break your career. Deal with it!"

But he doesn’t. Sigh. Instead he gives the guy the thumbs-up sign, which in America is cool but in the sheik's country is like flipping someone the bird. Tom didn't know that, but everyone got so in-his-face about it that he got mad and refused to apologize.

So basically his pride holds him back with the sponsors. UNTIL! The end. But let's back up a step first. This book makes me so happy I end up jumping all over the place about it.

So aside from the sponsor thing, there are a few other plot points I adore. One is the relationship between Yuri and Wyatt. I was worried that was going to blow up in their faces, which detracted from the rating I gave Insignia, but it didn't blow up! It's fine! Yay! Thank you, Ms. Kincaid, 'cause that would've made me so sad if it hadn’t worked out. I love Yuri.

One thing does make me sad, though. The adults all thought Yuri, our favorite Russian hottie, was a spy. All the kids thought they were full of it. Unfortunately, the grownups were right. Because of the neural processor chip that gets put into every combatant trainee, it's also possible to introduce malware and spyware into their neural processors and control them. You see it in the first book when someone does it to Tom (though it gets fixed in that book). Well, someone's doing it to Yuri. So he's not a spy, but the person controlling the malware in his neural processor is using him to spy. Boo. Tom, Vik, and Wyatt figure that out and manage to fix the problem, but not before Yuri almost ends up brain-dead. =(

But he's not a bad guy! So I'm happy about that. He's good, and he loves Wyatt very much, and eventually things will get resolved because he's a good guy and the good guys always win except in sucky books where everything falls apart.

Also a nice, complicated, wonderful plot point—Medusa. Now, I didn’t really talk about the combatant known as Medusa in my review of Insignia except briefly. In the first book, Medusa is the heretofore unbeatable combatant from the enemy nation, who Tom defeats near the end of Insignia. She and Tom are also best friends online throughout most of book one and spend a lot of time fighting each other in VR simulations because they're both warriors and they love that sort of thing and they bond with each other and slowly begin to fall in love (though they don't realize it then).

But the thing is, Tom has never seen Medusa's face. She always appears in different guises (for example, the very first time she and Tom face off against each other, she's wearing a sim-image of Achilles at a VR-simulation of the Battle of Troy). In Insignia, Tom used his neural processor and hacked into the security cameras where Medusa lives to see her face during the big fight near the end of the book, and discovers she's horribly disfigured. He uses that knowledge (and the emotional trauma that hits her because now he knows what she looks like) against her to win, which causes a HUGE rift between them. It takes half of book two, which spans several months, for Tom to make up for it.

And that's one of the plotlines I love from Vortex—Tom trying to re-woo Medusa through combat. It's just fun to watch, because Tom's adorkable, and he feels so bad for hurting Medusa (that's not her real name, btw—it's her call-sign; his is Mordred), and he just wants things to go back to the way they were between them, but he realizes they can't because he screwed up. So then he tries to regain her trust. And it's just sweet and cute and fun to read, and it's like…one of the best romantic subplots I've ever seen, and the way it's done is brilliant. I love it.

Going back to consequences of actions, by the way, one of the CamCo kids is murdered by one of their teachers during all of this. And it's like, "OMG WHAT?!" But then if you think about WHY the teacher killed her, it's actually more like, "Never mind, she deserved it." Because Tom can do this thing called interfacing (mentally controlling a machine NOT built for the neural processor), which only one other person in the world can do—Medusa. And it's considered a BIG deal. And it could get Tom killed if anyone but his teacher and Medusa find out.

So then this girl finds out, and she tells the teacher she's going to go blab it to the bad guy. And he keeps telling her, "You don't want to do that. People's lives are at stake. I can't let you. Don't make me do something drastic to stop you." And she's like, "Screw you, it's not like you can call the cops or anything, I'm doing it," so he kills her. It's like, "Well, maybe you shouldn’t have been screwing around with people's lives." And I like that because it's something you don't see a lot in books—that some secrets are actually worth killing for, to protect people.

A really interesting piece of character development in this book also is Vikram (Vik), Tom's best friend. Normally he's right up in the mayhem with Tom, but after stuff goes down with Yuri and the spy-thing and Yuri almost becoming brain-dead because the mayhem got them all in trouble, he starts putting distance between himself and Tom. He's shaken to learn just how serious things can get in the world he's entered into right now. But the thing I love is that when Tom really needs him, Vik puts aside his "holy crap" feelings and steps up to the plate again, and doesn't desert—unlike that little punk, Steven Beamer, from Insignia. I loathe that little twerp. I hope he gets eaten by a shark.

My only issues with this book are, it's shorter than book one, and…oh, wait. That's it. Well, and it sort of ends on a cliffhanger, but that's more me as the reader dying of a heart attack than an actual flaw. The characterization and character development of Vortex blows Insignia out of the water, and Insignia wasn’t bad to begin with. I also love the realism of the situations, the feelings about those situations, and the realism of the consequences of everyone's actions. I love it. LOVE this book!

Which is why I got both of them for Christmas!! WOOT!!

Happy holidays,

LA Knight

PS — The funny quotient in this book is pitch-perfect. Well done, SJ Kincaid!