Wednesday, October 31, 2018

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: Cross Fire by Fonda Lee



Cross Fire is the sequel to Fonda Lee's "Exo," which was a finalist for the Norton Award for Best SF/F Young Adult Novel last year (and which I reviewed here).  Exo was an interesting SciFi novel because of its premise: the Earth had been conquered by aliens, and protagonist Donovan Reyes is a member of the Collaborator human government's security forces (SecPac), though he winds up conflicted due to discovering his mother working with an underground resistance movement.  Despite his conflict, he didn't wind up changing sides in the novel, and the novel doesn't take a standard viewpoint of "resistance = good, collaboration = bad" which made it an interesting backdrop to a story with some decently interesting characters.

Cross Fire picks up right where Exo left off (well months later, but more or less) and follows through on two of the threatened plot points from Exo - the idea that the occupying aliens are planning to leave and that a new conquering force may be coming in their stead, which might require the resistance and collaborators to cooperate in order for humanity to survive.  Protagonist Donovan Reyes and some of the side characters remain excellent here, but large parts of this plot are rather predictable and while the story has some interesting ideas, it arguably punts around halfway through instead of dealing with them.  Cross Fire isn't bad - it's totally fine, and well constructed - but it fails to live up to the potential it has in its setup, alas.

 Once again, I read this book as an audiobook, where the reader is pretty good, but it means that I'll probably be misspelling terms here, so my apologies.  

More specifics after the Jump:

--------------------------------------------------Plot Summary---------------------------------------------------
It is a fraught time for the Planet Earth.  Donovan Reyes, SecPac Officer, has spent the past 8 months acting as in his (now dead) father's stead, as a human voice in the council of Zhree who rule the planet, as the Zhree colonist leaders try desperately to avoid an order from the Zhree homeworld to abandon the Earth.  And the terrorist anti-Zhree group Sapience is still out there, growing in strength, with violent radical Kevin Ward gaining in influence.  Donovan can't help feel a bit out of his depth in the midst of this, and his mental state isn't helped by the lack of contact from Anya, the girl from Sapience he fell for during his captivity in the past year.

But this uncertain equilibrium couldn't last, and when the Homeworld does send the order to evacuate the Zhree, everything begins to change.  Hardened Humans and those working with the Zhree find themselves under assault from people more sympathetic to Sapience, and the Homeworld Zhree are more concerned with evacuation than assisting.  And then there's the plan to evacuate a number of hardened humans to save their species....which would leave the rest of humanity behind to die.

Donovan is not his father - he's no master planner or leader of people who can guide humanity through this chaos.  But he knows that what is happening and being proposed to occur to Earth is wrong....and when the circumstances get worse and worse, he will be forced to make the unthinkable choice in order to save all of those he cares for....
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The best feature of Cross Fire is how well it shows off its characters.  Donovan Reyes remains an excellent and interesting character, but the side characters really get a chance to shine here.  Love interest Anya meanwhile also grows into her own, as her own capable agent for the Sapience organization, and more side characters like Jet and Vick are given more growth that make them something more than the one dimensional characters they seemed in the first book.

Still, this is Donovan's book, with the other characters often dropping out of scene for large stretches of any given time.  And his third person narration is fantastic and makes him incredibly easy to empathize with.  He's more well rounded now after the events of Exo but still out of his depth, but his convictions and actions now make him easy to root for, which is good, because he's the thread holding this plot together.  And the plot is fine, but unspectacular, for a bunch of reasons.

About those reasons, I had two in particular.  The first is that the plot is INCREDIBLY predictable.  The story begins with a mission that is blown due to a traitor, and the book makes it blatantly clear who that traitor must be pretty much immediately.  It's not a particularly big plot point given everything else that happens, but it's kind of silly.  Similarly, the book hints heavily that Donovan is going to need to get aid from a certain antagonist for certain purposes way early on, and Donovan spends a significant portion of the book trying to get that same aid from other sources (or trying to figure out what aid he needs) before, yep, going after that antagonist for help.  This is kind of annoying as a reader because you just want to slap the characters to get on where you expect them to go already.

The other issues is that the book kind of punts its most interesting ideas.  One of the more interesting parts of the duology (I think the series is complete, as I don't see it listed as a trilogy anywhere) is that our hero is on the side of the collaborators and never shifts his allegiance throughout.  That stance becomes increasingly difficult in this book as the Zhree begin to pack up and leave, potentially taking the most healthy and useful collaborator humans with them - leaving the rest of the collaborator humans weakly guarded and very likely to suffer at the hands of Sapience-aligned forces (not to mention the evil Aliens allegedly on their way).  But when the evil Aliens arrive, this issue is essentially rendered moot and meaningless, except in that it gives Donovan another reason to struggle against his ostensible Zhree allies....until the book punts on this idea too in the end.  The book then wraps things up with a bow really tightly in a way that well...is really easy.  In short, without trying to spoil too much (and I probably already have), the book has some really interesting different ideas and then casts them aside to become a simple more typical story, and that's a shame.

It's not that Cross Fire's plot is bad, but the setup just promised so much more, and fails to go there.  A review shouldn't ding a book for simply being a different book than the reader expected, instead of being simply bad, but Cross Fire gives every sign of being that different book until deciding not to be.  Ah well.
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