Rook

The world that was created in Rook was so cool. I loved the idea of a future society regressing and reliving its past. This whole book was basically a lesson in “history is always repeating itself.” I loved the class divides in Paris between the Upper City, the part of Paris that remained unharmed during the polar shift, where the higher classes lived, and the Sunken City, the portion of Paris that had sunk into the ground, filled with the lower classes and brimming with the terror brought on by the Razor’s hunt for its next victim. It was also fun to see nods to items from the present day; things like CDs and video game controllers were looked upon as artifacts in this future world and were hoarded away and sold on the black market to the highest bidder. The only problem with the world building in Rook is that there wasn’t enough of it. There were so many really interesting aspects to this world that weren’t explained. I wish we could have learned more about what had happened during the polar shift and how society ended up the way it did. There was also a new religion centered around the Goddess of Fate that played a role in this novel, but we didn’t get to learn anything about why this religion developed or what its tenets meant for its followers. Because there were so many things that weren’t explained, I was left a little confused about some of the events leading up to the start of the novel. I had some pretty mixed feelings about Rook as I was reading it. There were so many elements to this book that I absolutely loved, but I felt like something was missing. The story felt pretty flat; it moved along at a consistent pace, without any real highs or lows in the action. This book seemed to take me forever to read, and I felt like I would read for hours and nothing had really happened to move the plot along. I can’t exactly put my finger on it, but there was something missing from this book - that little something extra that takes a book from entertaining to engrossing.

The novel had a clever mix of historical and dystopian elements that, over all, flowed wonderfully well. The action was so tense at time that I found myself to be on the edge of my seat. The format of the novel flowed unbelievibly well and by the end I was left feeling satisfied with most loose ends tied up. I would reccomend it to those interested.