16. Sugar Rush

The book:  Rush (The Game #1)
The author:  Eve Silver
The rating:  4 stars

Despite Rush's health-nut protagonist, if I were asked to sum up the novel when I was half-way through, my answer would have been 'empty calories.'

For a long while, Rush felt like nothing but fluff.  It was little more than genre stereotype after genre stereotype; just in terms of the fifteen novels I've reviewed so far on this blog, if you mashed Whispers in Autumn with Relativity you'd probably get something close to Rush.  You've got Miki, an angsty teen protagonist (she's still mourning the loss of her mother), a stereotypical love triangle between Miki, Luka, and Jackson (the cute, friendly, open childhood friend versus the aloof, sexy, mysterious stranger), a 'normal teen life' complete with drama that would make any real teenager cringe (and, like Relativity, a completely embarrassing texting sequence), underdeveloped throwaway secondary characters, not to mention that our protagonist is SuperSpecial™.  Even the whole 'incredibly original' aliens plot seems to be Ender's Game with a slight coat of paint.

Then it all began to change.  I'm not the kind of girl who falls for the aloof, sexy, mysterious boy.  Never.  Not Ky in Matched, or Edward in Twilight, or Gabriel in Dark Visions.  I'm the kind of girl who rolls her eyes when the heroine falls in love with the bad boy yet again, just another cliched conclusion to a cliched love triangle.

I fell for Jackson Tate.

Because, gradually, so many of the cliches that Rush presents are subverted.  The love triangle fades away like a breath of fresh reality.  When Jackson's aloof, sexy, mysterious facade begins to chip, it's not a cardboard cutout the reader finds beneath, but an intriguing, unique character.  For the first time in quite a long while, I've read a love story that I can buy into.  So many times while reading YA novels I bemoan the artificial taste of the romance, that the characters lack chemistry, that the couple fell too quickly for their love to feel real.  But not Rush.  The pacing, the chemistry, everything was perfect, a wonderful complement to the novel's primary plot.

By the novel's end, Rush had broken almost completely from its chrysalis of cliches, coming tentatively into its own.  Miki's growth as a character is clear, and her shifting personality and view of her world allows for some intriguing contrast.  As for the end... well, I'm glad June is only a couple months away, because I don't think I could wait longer to get my hands on the sequel, Push (although if Silver pulls an Ender's Game-style twist on me, I'll just have to take back all those compliments about shedding cliche).