Book: Rebelwing by Andrea Tang

Published February 2020 by Razorbill|355 pages

Where I Got It: I borrowed the hardcover from the library

Series: Rebelwing #1

Genre: YA Sci-fi/Dystopia

Business is booming for Prudence Wu.

A black-market-media smuggler and scholarship student at the prestigious New Columbia Preparatory Academy, Pru is lucky to live in the Barricade Coalition where she is free to study, read, watch, and listen to whatever she wants. But between essays and exams, she chooses to spend her breaks sweet-talking border patrol with her best friend, Anabel, in order to sell banned media to the less fortunate citizens of the United Continental Confederacy, Inc.

When a drop-off goes awry, Pru narrowly escapes UCC enforcers to find that her rescuer is, of all things, a sentient cybernetic dragon. On the one hand, Pru is lucky not to be in prison, or worse. On the other, the dragon seems to have imprinted on her permanently, which means she has no choice but to be its pilot.

Drawn into a revolution she has no real interest in leading, Pru, Anabel, and friends Alex and Cat become key players in a brewing conflict with the UCC as the corporate government develops advanced weaponry more terrifying and grotesque than Pru could have ever imagined.

I wasn’t sure about this book at first!  It took me a while to get into, and at one point, I was pretty close to not finishing it at all.  But I’m glad I kept reading and I ended up really liking it!

This is a future I can easily imagine- the U.S. is split up into different territories, and not everyone can access banned media.  It’s a scary future, and the world was frighteningly familiar.  Mechanical wyverns and dragons are pretty cool, I have to admit, and the weaponry is pretty horrifying.  Pru, of course, gets drawn into this revolution that she had no idea was even happening, and with how the book ended, she has a lot to deal with.  I’m curious to see how things go, and how she’ll deal with a corporate government and the terrifying things they can come up with.

I’m not sure how I feel about Pru.  Or anyone else that we see.  I get why Anabel kept things from Pru, but I also get why Pru didn’t take it well.  They work through it, of course, and they’re really going to need each other.  Especially with everything that Pru went through in this book…particularly towards the end.  I feel like Alex gets it, since he went through the same thing she did.  I know they’ll be fine, but it will be hard, especially for Alex.  With what he learned about his family…I can’t imagine learning that.  I felt for both of them, because no one should have to go through what they did.  In all honesty, there’s not a lot I remember about them, other than the basics.

There’s a lot of action, adventure and politics, and the further I got into the book, the more I wanted to know what would happen next.  I was interested to see what was really going on in this world, and how we even got to this point.  Pru’s pretty lucky, but still trying to figure out her place in the world.  And of course, she’s doing it while bonding to a mechanical dragon she has to pilot because it imprinted on her, instead of Alex, the person it was supposed to bond with.  I am pretty interested to see how she changes in the next book and to see her really decide what she wants in life.

Rebelwing gets 4 stars- I really liked this one.  It took me some time to get into the book, but I’m glad I kept reading and didn’t give up on it.