Zeroes

Kids in a society have special "powers". One has "the voice" that takes over his voice to allow him to get out of any sticky situation. Another is always forgotten. One girl can control crowds. Some of them meet together as Zeros. The boy with the voice gets involved with a gang and then a bank robbery when attempting to get a ride home. The daughter of one of the robbers has powers (but is not part of the Zeros). Boy and girl both try to hide. (Boy hides with "anonymous" kid in a luxury penthouse.) Boy and girl meet. They eventually uncover powers of each other. There is another big event in the city that they use their powers on.

Leviathan

It took me a while to understand what was going on in Leviathan. It sounded like a World War I novel. Were walkers and airships real things? Wait, they are creatures created by "Darwinists". There is obviously some science fiction involved. And finally once it is a third of the way through, I'm finally starting to get the characters and understand what is going on.

The story takes place at the dawn of World War I. One main character is a boy who is the son of the "guy with the funny hat" whose assassination started the great war. He gets to pilot a "walker" to a safe house on a glacier where he discovers that he is next in line to rule the empire. The other lead is a girl who is disguised as a boy to join the British military and work on a living "airship". The end up meeting and help each other out.

Once I realized what was going on, I liked it. The history is a million miles removed from the actual "real" history. However, it just took a few minor turns to get there. The story isn't much. However, the setting and the characters make up for it. We'll see if the next few books in the series start to focus more on plot.

So Yesterday

So Yesterday is a dated, fun book about corporate trend setters. Corporate brands are "alluded" too regularly, but rarely explicitly mentioned. Some of the allusions show the fragility of corporate hegemony. (That Finnish cell phone maker? Well, yeah, they were kind of bought by Microsoft, written off, and are trying to come back around.)

The story focuses on shoes. The protaganist, Hunter, is a teenager on the lookout for what is cool. He is paid by the big corporations to find cool shoes. He finds a girl that has a cool way of doing her laces, and from there the adventure begins. They find the coolest shoes they've ever seen (Anti-Nikes), nearly get kidnapped, try to rescue a kidnapped marketeer, spend thousands for expensive clothes to attend a party for the ultra rich and "fall in love" (sort of). He also tells us about the different "places" in the trend setting scale, from the people that start trends, to the people that stay forever behind the trends. He was "cool" in Minnesota, but total dorkus when he got to New York City. He goes out on all these crazy adventures, but then stops back home to eat dinner with his parents. It is a fun book that manages to be "cool" while still being a lot of fun.