![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() In over 400 pages of dizzying excess and desperate partying, no one cuts through the “Gordian knot of these highliers’ screwed-up lives.” Readers wanting more substance should seek out J.G. McGee offers intriguing sci-fi elements-communication-enabling contact lenses, hovercraft, holography-but sacrifices social commentary or dystopian revolution for traditional teenage melodrama. While the multiplicity of narrators causes tiresome plot repetition, it mimics the self-absorbed world of the Tower’s top tier. The economically stratified Tower also seems racially segregated black Leda fights to overcome her middle-class origins, and lower-floor (and therefore lower-class) Iranian-American Watt and “half-Asian” Rylin falter as foils for the mostly white 1 percent. Newcomer con artist Calliope Brown and her mother also seek to exploit the richer residents. There’s Avery Fuller and her semi-incestuous relationship with her adopted brother, Atlas hacker Watzahn “Watt” Bakradi and his illegal quantum computer and scholarship-student Rylin Myers and her criminal ex-boyfriend. Vicious and ambitious Leda Cole struggles to conceal her murder of Eris Dodd-Radson by blackmailing her witnesses over their darkest secrets. Surrounded by extravagance and futuristic technology, the elite teens of the top floors of the 1,000-story Tower in New York City still manage to be miserable. Guilty parties continue to party in this soap-opera sequel. ![]()
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