Book Review: The Rift Uprising by Amy S. Foster

Title: The Rift Uprising

Author: Amy S. Foster

Series: The Rift Uprising Trilogy #1

Genre: Young Adult Sci-Fi

Publisher: Harper Voyager

Pub Date: October 4, 2016 

Pages: 368 

My Copy: Courtesy of Edelweiss and Harper Voyager

Book Summary:

The first book in the fast-paced action-adventure, The Rift Uprising trilogy—an enthralling mix of speculative fiction and military thriller—in which a young soldier comes to question the monsters she’s trained to fight against . . . and the monsters she fights for

Seventeen-year-old Ryn Whittaker is a Citadel: an elite, enhanced soldier specially chosen to guard a Rift, a mysterious and dangerous portal to alternate Earths scientists cannot control or close. Trained from the age of fourteen, Ryn can run faster, jump farther, and fight better than a Navy SEAL—which is good when you’re not sure if a laser-wielding Neanderthal or an axe-wielding Viking is trying to make it through the Rift and into her world.

But the teenager’s military conditioning and education have not prepared her for the boy who crosses through—a confused young man, seemingly lost and alone. Because while there’s an immediate physical attraction, it’s his intelligence and curiosity that throws Ryn off balance. The stranger asks disturbing questions about the Rift that Ryn herself has never considered—questions that lead her to wonder if everything about her life and what she’s been told these past six years has been a lie. Are the Rifts as dangerous as her leaders say? Should her people really try to close them . . . or learn how to travel through them?

Book Review:

An interesting take on inter dimensional travel and what it brings to people. I like how all the characters are very interesting. Ryn. and Ezra definitely are not what you would call a typical couple. They come from two different places, but yet somehow find an attraction that they can’t deny.

One of the things that I really liked about this book was how they explain about the Rifts and how they opened and what happened all across the globe and how different creatures were coming out from other earths. Different groups of inter-dimensional immigrants come through, some of them were non-violent, others were very violent and reacted badly. We also get to learn that some of these inter-dimensional species, creatures, and immigrants caused a lot of violence and disruption, so they needed to create soldiers or a technology to help fight the violent inter-dimensional aliens. They created technology that they implanted in certain infants and over time perfected the technology to make soldiers. One of those infants was Ryn.

So we go forward some time and get to meet Ryn and her group of friends and family. She is like any other teenager, but has a few secrets of her own. The Citadels are the ones who find out through their superiors where a Rift will open and try to contain anything that comes through it.  Of course, we go through the usual smart mouth antics of teenagers, but they have a command structure. Things happen during a Rift opening up, and someone comes out that speaks their language. Ryn, immediately opens up to him and starts talking to him to keep him calm. His name is Ezra. Ezra is not like anybody she has ever met before. Ryn has questions about him.

We learn about her family and friends. Yet she can’t tell anybody about the Citadel program. Ryn gets curious about what happens in the camps and find out that it’s not like anything that she has been told. There is a community of immigrants. Yet the immigrants are not allowed to have children. So things there are not what she expects them to be. We also learn that Ezra is like a genius. He is totally smart and starts to tell Ryn, that sometimes you need to question things. They get to know one another, plus Ezra has been catching up on our universe TV shows, in particular The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. (RN: Thought that was a great pop culture reference thrown in that I really loved).

This questioning leads Ryn, and Ezra to do things that neither of them expected. I really liked the romance between these two in a way even though it seemed more like Ezra challenged Ryn, to be less accepting and start thinking for herself. It was a really interesting thing to see in a YA novel. We also learn that the Rifts started and no one knows why or how they came to exist in the first place. This book had a lot of exciting moments and the fact that she has to face people, her former teammates during the end of the book.

Plus we learn something important about the Rifts at the very end of this book and it was quite interesting. I’m looking forward to seeing what else is planned for this trilogy and what else we learn about the Rifts.

Rating: 

4 Hearts