Icons
Margaret Stohl
Publisher: Little Brown
Books for Young Readers
Release Date: May 7, 2013
Series or Standalone: Icons
#1
ISBN: 0316205184
Format: ARC
Pages: 428
Websites:
Rating: 3 Stars
Icons was
one of those books that I couldn’t fully get into. I didn’t hate but I didn’t
love it, it was mehh. Icons had a lot
of potential and I am interested to see were this series goes, but as the first
book in a series it felt very jumbled and disconnected.
Icons is
set in the not so distant future in a post-invasion world where aliens hold the
complete control and most of the population has been killed. As the tagline
says “Your heart only beats with their permission.” It is hard for me to
describe what sort of world, Dol, the main character, is living in because I
couldn’t really get a clear picture of what it was like. This post-invasion
world didn’t seem to be fully constructed which oftentimes left me feeling
confused. The politics of this world also were confusing. I did not really
understand why things were happening, or why the Ambassadors were so bad or
what was up with the rebellion faction. I felt I had to struggle to put together
the pieces of this world, something that should be clearly developed in the
first book of a series.
The characters in the book
left me wanting more. I couldn’t connect to any of them. They were all so flat
and emotionless, though as children of the Icon, emotionless they shouldn’t be.
The romance in the book felt stale, probably because of the lack of depth in
the characters. The only character I found remotely interesting was Doc, and he
was an artificial intelligence.
The plot was intriguing
enough that it kept me turning the pages. There was plenty of action and
mystery to keep me interested in finding out more. I really enjoyed how between
chapters there would be different artifacts or clips that related to the plot
in a not so clear way until the
end. The biggest thing that kept me reading was the mystery of the Icons. Well,
that’s not fully answered in this book, but I look forward to finding more out
of them.
As a first book in a series,
Icons left me feeling confused and
wanting more. I expected more from this book than it gave me. I’ll be reading
the sequel because the story was interesting enough to make me want to keep
reading, but I hope in the next book the world and characters are more
developed. I can’t help but compare this post-alien invasion book to another
new alien invasion book, The 5th
Wave by Rick Yancey, and this just falls flat in comparison to that.
Hopefully Margaret Stohl can deliver more in the next Icon series book.
