Just Finished Reading Warcross by Marie Lu

Marie Lu has already earned a name for herself in the fiction series business with The Young Elites and Legend...I've yet to read either.  She has begun a new one and the first book is titled Warcross.  Warcross is a ten-year old interactive virtual reality video game...some 90% of young adults worldwide are avid players and the number keeps growing.  Each year there is a world championship tournament played in Tokyo, the home of the game's inventor...a young man by the name of Hideo Tanaka.  The story's protagonist is a young woman, Emika Chen, who since her arrest in high school for hacking the accounts of people in retaliation for persecuting a friend of hers, has lived on the outskirts of society, struggling to earn a living in New York City as a bounty hunter whose main focus is finding gambling law violators, usually in relation to Warcross.  She is very likable and sympathetic, and is also a big fan of Warcross, both as an anonymous player and a follower of the top world professional leagues and players.  At the opening of the world championship, she impulsively hacks into a game, which is being broadcast worldwide...but she is exposed in the act, with her image visible everywhere: now almost everywhere people recognize her. Very shortly thereafter Hideo Tanaka contacts her and invites her to Tokyo...and so continues the rest of the story, which you're invited to read for yourself...

There is a tone to Warcross that is glaringly apparent to me, a outsider in the world of video gaming. My video game playing pretty much ended with Sega's Sonic the Hedgehog series, which my son Will stoically conquered as a little kid.  His generation is totally tuned in to video gaming...mine isn't, a truly substantial generation gap.  I know folks around me who are totally into this activity and they seem differently wired mentally than those like me who aren't...that's not a criticism, just an observation.  I kind of wish that I had gotten into them earlier in my life, but they seemed kind of pointless back then and, well, I still hold to that viewpoint to an extent.  But it would have served as a sort of generational conduit had I been a little better versed in the different games.  Warcross seems to make the assumption that "virtually" everyone is into video gaming, though...an assumption that I would beg to differ with.  Still, it is set sometime in the future...maybe the author thought that by then "my" generation would have already gone by the wayside.  I liked Warcross, though, and plan to follow this blossoming series which I expect will be adapted to movies...