Title: Oppression
Author: Jessica Therrien
Pages: 346 (paperback)
Rating: 3.5/5 stars
As a slightly closet YA reader, I love love love books about re-imagined Greek myths. Problem is, I don’t particularly like The Lightning Theif the mainstream ones, which causes all kinds of amusing badly genre-defined books to hit my kindle. Oppression was not one of them.
Elyse (Ellie) Adler is an 89-year-old seventeen-year-old newly relocated to California. And her stunted aging isn’t the only odd thing about her. She doesn’t necessarily know it, but she’s a Descendant, of the bloodline Asclepius, which means she can heal or kill with her blood as she chooses. And there are more like her than she ever could have imagined. The Descendants are everywhere, staying out of the eyes of the humans. Just as she’s ecstatic to find more of her kind, they tell her that she is the subject of a prophecy stating that she will be the catalyst for a war against the corrupt rulers of the Descendants, all while being followed by vicious Kara and seduced by gorgeous William, the government-assigned female stalker and the boy sort of next door. But as the stakes rise, Ellie is not sure she can handle the pressure to perform as the prophecy says that she will.
As I’m sure most people would have figured it out anyways, I’ll just get it out of the way: I have a very high tolerance for how much suspension of disbelief a book requires. And I will admit that Oppression requires a bit of it. But once you can get over that, it’s interesting, not only in the sense that the actual plot is fairly engaging, but because the Greek gods are approached in a very different way than anything I’ve read recently. They’re not actually gods, you see, just particularly strange creatures that the humans turned into gods in their literature. And just like the humans, they have their own culture and traditions, they just keep them under tighter wraps than us. All in all, it’s actually kind of cool to see how well the world is thought out.
There’s a reason that I picked this particular Friday to review this particular book. Say hello to the recently released cover of the sequel to Oppression, Uprising!
Isn’t is gorgeous? The release date is February 9th, 2013, and I cannot wait! I know I, at least, will be on the lookout for ARC opportunities.
Happy Friday!
Rosey
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