Promo Post - Review and Giveaway: The Swan Riders (Prisoners of Peace #2) by Erin Bow

Book info:

Title:  The Swan Riders  
Author:  Erin Bow
Series:  The Prisoners of Peace #2  
Genre:  YA Science Fiction
Published:  September 20th, 2016
Source:  ARC received from Publisher - Simon and Schuster Teen

ABOUT THE SWAN RIDERS:
Greta Stuart had always known her future: die young. She was her country's crown princess, and also its hostage, destined to be the first casualty in an inevitable war. But when the war came it broke all the rules, and Greta forged a different path.

She is no longer princess. No longer hostage. No longer human. Greta Stuart has become an AI.

If she can survive the transition, Greta will earn a place alongside Talis, the AI who rules the world. Talis is a big believer in peace through superior firepower. But some problems are too personal to obliterate from orbit, and for those there are the Swan Riders: a small band of humans who serve the AIs as part army, part cult.

Now two of the Swan Riders are escorting Talis and Greta across post-apocalyptic Saskatchewan. But Greta’s fate has stirred her nation into open rebellion, and the dry grassland may hide insurgents who want to rescue her – or see her killed. Including Elian, the boy she saved—the boy who wants to change the world, with a knife if necessary. Even the infinitely loyal Swan Riders may not be everything they seem.

Greta’s fate—and the fate of her world—are balanced on the edge of a knife in this smart, sly, electrifying adventure.

LINKS: Amazon | Barnes and Noble

My Review:
I was so excited when I saw that Irish Banana Tours was going to be featuring this book.  I really enjoyed the first one in the series, and was excited to see where it would go from where it left off.  If you want to read that review instead of reading this one, go check that out HERE.    

This book fit into something that I often notice as a trend in second books in a series, an "on the road" or traveling story.  That's not a bad thing, just not always the most fun for a story.  I really liked the way this book went about making the Artificially Intelligent being, Talis, feel what it was like to be human again, since he hadn't been human in such a long time.  Being with Greta and seeing just how the transformation into being an AI so recently after being human was definitely an eye-opener,  and really helped explain a lot of the things in the story.  There are also the issues the Swan Riders themselves are dealing with, that the AI don't even have any record of.  There is also a debilitating palsy type of condition that the Riders go through after being possessed by Talis or other AI.  Meeting some of the other AI personalities was also intriguing. The fact that someone let a 9 year old girl become one of an AI group that would eventually be in charge of the whole world is really kind of a horrible thought.  

Where the story left off this time makes me think there could be another book, although it is possible to end it where it did.  I really do hope for another book though, as there are still some things I didn't quite understand completely yet, or issues that I didn't feel had been resolved satisfactorily for me.  But once again this was a really unique look at a future where AI is in charge of our human lives, and tries to keep peace the way it thinks is best.  And I was glad to see that Greta got the chance to see Elian once again, and find out just what he would think of her now, even if there was more of a rebellion that he had become part of.

ABOUT ERIN BOW:

Hi!  My name is Erin Bow -- physicist turned poet turned author of young adult novels that will make you cry on the bus. I'm a white girl, forty-something, feminist, geeky enough to do the Vulcan salute with both hands -- in public.  I live in Canada.  I love to cook, hate to clean, and yes, I do own a cat. 

In the beginning, I was a city girl from farm country—born in Des Moines and raised in Omaha—where I was fond of tromping through wood lots and reading books by flashlight. In high school I captained the debate team, founded the math club, and didn’t date much.

In university I studied particle physics, and worked briefly at the European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) near Geneva, Switzerland. Physics was awesome, but graduate school kind of sucked, and at some point I remembered that I wanted to write books. 

Books:  I have six of them — three novels, and two volumes of poetry and a memoir (the poetry under my maiden name, Erin Noteboom). My poetry has won the CBC Canadian Literary Award, and several other awards. My two novels, Plain Kate and Sorrow's Knot, also have a fistful of awards, including Canada's top award for children's literature, the TD.   The third novel, The Scorpion Rules, still faces its award season. No one read the memoir. 

Right now I'm looking forward to the publication of my fourth novel,  a companion piece to The Scorpion Rules called The Swan Riders, which will be out September 20 from Simon and Schuster.  I'm at work on an new an entirely different novel, and a book of poetry about science.

Did you notice I got to Canada in there somewhere?   Yeah, that was true love.  I'm married to a Canadian boy, James Bow, who also writes young adult novels.  We have two small daughters, both of whom want to be scientists.   

 LINKS: Website | Twitter | Facebook | Tumblr

Giveaway:

• 3 Finished Copies of THE SWAN RIDERS (US Only) 

    a Rafflecopter giveaway

Tour Schedule:
Week 1:
9/12: Fangs and Fur Fantasy Book Review - Review
9/13: The Cover Contessa - Guest Post
9/14: Live to Read - Review
9/15: Such A Novel Idea - Q&A
9/16: Intellectual Recreation - Review

Week 2:
9/19: Novel Ink - Q&A
9/20: The Story Sanctuary - Review
9/21: Book Stacks Amber - Playlist
9/22: Lisa Loves Literature - Review - YOU ARE HERE
9/23: A Backwards Story - Q&A  

Review: The Body Electric by Beth Revis

First, thanks to Netgalley and Scripturient Books for allowing  me to read an e-galley of this.  It actually got it after the book had been released, but I was very excited to see it.  I am a huge fan of the author, Beth Revis, as I loved her Across the Universe series.  And this one sounded right up my alley as well.  Another science fiction story.

The main character is Ella.  She and her mom work at a Spa type place that offers something only to the extremely rich called Reveries.  Reveries are something where they can hook into your brain and make you experience a really good memory.  It is something Ella's mom came up with, but hasn't wanted to turn it over to the government to make money. She wants to keep it as something nice to help people.  Ella's mother is also dying from a disease that is incurable.  When her mom first got sick, Ella's dad who was working on artificial intelligence, figured out a way to add nanobots that would help her stay healthy longer.  In fact, in this day and age, in part thanks to Ella's father, every person has nanobots that help to keep them from getting sick among other things like that.  Ella's father was killed in a terrorist attack though, and now it is just her and her mom, as well as the main owner of the Spa, Ms. White.  Ella is doing her internship at the spa so that she can be close to her mother. As the nanobots aren't going to keep her mom alive forever.

One day when her mom takes a bit of a turn for the worse, Ella goes for a walk.  To where her father's grave is. Although in this day and age, no one is buried anymore.  Instead they are cremated. But if you are someone rich, or important, like Ella's father, they will do something like plant a tree for them with a monument/gravestone.  And when Ella gets to her father's, she sees a young man standing there, as if he too is talking to her dad the way she plans to.  She doesn't recognized the boy, who says his name is Jack Tyler, but he seems to think they once had a past.  And he leaves her a cryptic message, that when other things besides her mother's sickness start to go wrong, she turns to that message for help.  She has been enlisted by the ruler of their country to use the reverie to try to see inside a Representative's brain.  One who they hear has been approached by a terrorist group.  And they hope Ella can get the information out of his head.

But as I said, things will go wrong.  There are androids/robots in this world, but no one has been able to figure out how to make them think for themselves yet.  Ella's father had been working on that before he died, but all his notes and work were lost in the explosion.  And as more and more goes wrong, Ella begins to wonder just who is really on her side.  Her friend who is on the moon at the military base for her internship seems to be not who she once was. This Jack Tyler may have worked with her father, and she even wonders if her father might not have been the man she thought he was.  She will have to determine if she really wants to help the government, or if the terrorists are really terrorists.

Such a great story.  The love story was okay because she didn't remember him even if he remembered her, so she was able to develop real feelings.  And there was at least one twist at the end that I wasn't expecting, so it was a great ending.  No cliffhanger, or love triangle, I highly recommend this for a great sci-fi read.  Very Isaac Asimov is what I thought as I read it.

Review: Expiration Day by William Campbell Powell

Thanks again to Tor Teen and Edelweiss for allowing me to read an e-galley of this back in the fall.  I chose this one based on the synopsis, and it wasn't bad.  I enjoyed it, and once I got into it I was hooked. I do have to say that unfortunately the end of it was disappointing though.
The main character is Tania Deeley.  It is the year 2049, and humans are dying out.  Fewer and fewer people are able to have children.  Now this is something that seems pretty realistic in a way to me.  It seems there are more and more people who have to go through doctors with lots of help to get pregnant.  And even then it doesn't always work well.  So I like this bit of reality pulled in to make the story.  So in this future, to help stop the violence that had been overtaking the world, the robot industry, and the government, now offer to families who are unable to have children a robot child.  But this robot is so lifelike, the parents don't usually even notice it is a robot.  Part of the contract is that the "child" will get updates every so often, so that they "grow up".  The robots don't know they are robots.  When they go have their updates, a story is told that they had to have surgery, and they remember being like they are now.  Now, they only get to be with their families until they are 18.  At which time the company that they came from takes them back.  Supposed to be the same as normal children who go off on their own at the age of 18.  We begin with Tania who is the daughter of the Vicar in her town.  She has a loving family.  She wonders which of the children around her are robots.  She does know of one boy that was a robot because she found him after he fell in the water.  She thinks maybe the one girl that she is really friends with, Sian, might be.  But then she has to help her with school work, and Tania doesn't think that sounds like something a robot would need help with. So she's unsure who is.  Until she goes out on a holiday with Sian and her family.  And as they're playing a game of hide and seek or tag or something, Tania falls in the water.  And now Tania knows she is a robot.  Normally, once the robot children find out they are robots, they often begin to act weird, and the family can no longer handle them.  And so they send them back, and get a partial refund.  But Tania and her family seem to get past all of this okay.  Tania also met a boy on a past holiday named John.  But she doesn't want him to know she is a robot.  But she decides she's ready for an upgrade because Sian is growing up, and Tania doesn't want to look like a 13 year old, she wants to look older.  So we get to follow Tania through her life, and see how being a robot might affect her life now that she knows.  But sometimes she wonders how can she just be a robot.  She loves to play the bass guitar.
I love the story, and the build up of how can this be just a robot when she has feelings and makes her own decisions.  Her family also got a robot servant before she knew she was a robot, but he was not like her.  He had to be given orders and told what to do.  You really feel for Tania, and when it gets close to her 18th birthday, and her father wants to fight to keep her, I really enjoyed the evidence he gathered and how he presented it to the judge/magistrate.  I won't tell you how the book turns out.  I just don't know that I was satisfied with the ending.  Oh yeah, the book is told in a diary format, and Tania pretends she is writing to an alien named Zog.  And partway through the book, it is as if this alien has found her diary and we get his point of view.  Not sure how I felt about that part either.  Overall a good, quick read.  Just not probably the best wrap up to the story.  I must say I am glad to read something that is a standalone for a change instead of a series.