REBELWING – Andrea Tang | Looking For a Good Book

Prudence “Pru” Wu is a bright scholarship student at New Columbia Preparatory Academy. She is also a smuggler. Pru smuggles media.

Using feminine charms, she manages to charm and distract the border guards and is then able to sell banned media to the starved-for-connections less fortunates who live in the United Continental Confederacy, Inc. But something goes wrong and Pru is barely able to escape capture by the UCC ‘police’ with the help of an android dragon that has imprinted itself on Pru. The pair find themselves in the middle of a revolution as the UCC, a corporate government, is developing terrifyingly powerful weapons of mass destruction.

I can see where this book will have a large readership among YA readers. The book hits all the right notes with a smart, feisty, young woman who is thrown into a role she didn’t want, but takes on the challenge. She’s helped by a group of friends and a dragon. But not just any dragon, a cybernetic one with an AI so powerful that the dragon seems sentient.

We have a future world that is dystopian but not savagely so – no reverting to clannish, animalistic behavior but instead going high-tech and with high-powered government taking too much control.

We also have LGBTQ themes, romance that isn’t dominating the pages but enough to satisfy the average YA reader, and plenty of action.

And yet, this book did not hold my attention.

On paper (pun intended) this book looks like it should be a no-brainer – it’s got everything! Yet I was mostly bored. It’s almost as though this is too much by the numbers, hitting the notes without passion. Everything here seemed familiar to me – a pastiche of a variety of YA books and there was nothing that really took hold to carry me through the story.

It will do well, I’m sure. It will find a new audience of young readers, but for me this just didn’t work.

Looking for a good book? Rebelwing by Andrea Tang is an adventurous YA book that will hold much appeal for young readers, but is not as exciting for the seasoned reader.