23. Agency

The book:  Fractured (Slated #2)
The author:  Teri Terry
The rating:  3 stars

Simply put, Fractured pales in comparison to the first novel in the series.  The wonderful, immersive, and thrilling story is replaced by a slew of cheap twists and turns, coming at the reader at the bizarre pace of nothing at all, and then all at once.  There's the twist where that character you knew was a bad guy all along reveals that they were a bad guy all along (to be honest, there's quite a few of these).  There's the twist where that character you knew was going to die dies.  There's the twist where that character you knew was a good guy all along reveals that they were a good guy all along.  And it's not just double agents; its triple and quadruple and pseudo-agents that are all thrown at you at such a rapid-fire pace that you couldn't give two hoots about any of them.

Furthermore, I stopped caring about Kyla.  As she gained literal freedom, losing her Levo and regaining some of her past, her character bizarrely lost agency, tossed between one group and another, constantly manipulated and with no discernible spirit of her own other than an ever-present, grating whine for her instalove, Ben.  The other characters were just as drab.  The interesting cast of the first book was mostly sidelined, their roles marginalized to mere plot devices:  Amy, Kyla's mum, Ben, even Dr. Lysander, to a point.  Their pagetime is given away to an irritating cast of terrorists from Kyla's past life as Rain; Nico in particular was grating to read.  Just as the intriguing characters were replaced by a flat ensemble with obvious fates, the thought-provoking questions of memory and identity were pushed aside to make room for a lackluster exploration of whether killing is ever justified.  The side supporting violence is designed to be soulless and extreme, making this exploration fairly unsatisfying; the reader is never forced to deal with a moral quandary, as it is always obvious that the AGT is just as bad as the Lorders.

However, Fractured is also the opposite of Slated in another regard:  while fantastic-novel Slated had a weak ending, Fractured's final chapters are perhaps the best part of the novel.  If the tone set at the end of Fractured carries over into its sequel like Slated's did, Shattered may well redeem the series for all this middle novel's wrongs.  I'm eager to finally learn more about Lucy and move far, far, away from Rain, easily the most intolerable of Kyla's threefold identities.  Shattered may not be next on my reading list, but Fractured hasn't quashed my spirit enough to stop me from coming back entirely.