Thank you, NetGalley and Gallery Books for providing the arc of Firebreak by Nicole Kornher-Stace in exchange for my honest review.

In Firebreak, we follow Mal, Mallory, through a dystopian world where major corporations are battling for control and destroying everyone around them. When Mal was 8, her home was destroyed in an airstrike killing her entire family, along with many others. Mal was taken in by Stellaxis (one of the corporations) and send to a camp to live with other kids until she was old enough to be put into a converted hotel room living with 8 other young adults in 1 room.

The best part about this new world for Mal is the VR war game she plays with her BFF Jessa. It’s not the killing that Mal likes, it’s the chance to get close to the SpecOps operatives (superhero-like supersoldiers created and owned by Stellaxis).

I’m not a gamer, but I do love a gamer’s world and I thought the gaming aspect of Firebreak was very well done. We get to see two female gamers who know what they are doing and kick some butt doing it. Unfortunately, I had a tough time with the MC. Mal is a flawed character. She’s an introvert, which isn’t a bad thing and when done right, can be fun to read, but her snark and rudeness to those around her gnawed at me. She’s protective of strangers but rude to the people she’s closest to. Most importantly there is no character growth. She is the same person from start to finish, which doesn’t make sense given all she goes through.

The story itself gave off a YA vibe that I found interesting, however, there were a lot of swear words that felt out of place. Almost like a young kid swearing just for the sake of swearing and not because they need or want to swear.

Overall I would say it was a fun-ish read. I had moments when I really enjoyed the world and I have no problem suggesting this book for fans of dystopian and sci-fi gaming stories. It just didn’t blow my mind the way I had hoped it would.

TL;DR: VR streamer (& bestie) go from eking out a living just to afford enough water for the occasional shower to uncovering a terrible corporate-military conspiracy in this anticapitalist, feminist near-future-dystopia that’s simply a WAY better book than Ready Player One. My rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

Ready Player One and Firebreak are both set in a dystopian near-future where characters spend much of their time in a VR game world designed by a large corporation. The similarities stop there. Firebreak is hands down the better book. Why?

Firebreak’s out-of-game worldbuilding and plot is far more absorbing and twisty.
Firebreak has no venerated celebrity billionaires, pretentious pop culture references, or icky manic pixie dream girl love stories.
Firebreak is *actually* anticapitalist, and in an alarmingly scary and prescient way.
Firebreak is feminist af.
Basically all the reasons.

With that comparison out of the way, I can say that Firebreak is a dystopia for the moment. Given the rampant corporate consolidation by large tech companies and outsize influence they have on every aspect of our daily lives today, it’s not difficult to flash forward and imagine the 2132 of Firebreak where two large corporations (Stellaxis and Greenleaf) have completely displaced the influence and functions of the US government. Advanced digital communication technology is provided to people for free or cheap, as it allows for widespread surveillance, while water and food are exorbitantly expensive. Both internet access and meager water rations can be cut off by the company at will, especially to punish would-be opposition activists. Stellaxis and Greenleaf have waged war for years over territory (i.e. more captive revenue-generating “citizens”), destroying and displacing families in the process. Mal is one such victim of the corporate wars, having been orphaned when her family’s apartment building collapsed. She lives in a converted over-crowded hotel room with other orphaned young adults juggling multiple low-wage jobs to have enough money just to eat, drink water, shower, and flush the toilet. One of Mal’s jobs is as a streamer in a popular VR game designed by the Stellaxis corporation. Mal and her best friend, Jessa, strive to gain fame and subscribers by climbing the game rankings and/or capturing elusive footage of the in-game avatars of Stellaxis’s corporations famed soldiers/quasi-superheroes, who’re said to be human-engineered AI designed to fight in the corporate wars.

After a chance encounter with one of these so-called SecOps avatars, Mal and Jessa are contacted by a mysterious sponsor willing to pay for more footage of the avatars that can help prove a conspiracy theory about the SecOps program. Initially unbelieving, Mal is eventually drawn into the conspiracy and finds herself at odds with the powerful and dangerous Stellaxis corporation. From there, the story is fast-paced and exciting. The mystery unfolds in unexpected ways as Mal exhibits frankly unreal levels of bravery in the face of murderous corporate violence.

This is the rare book where I appreciated worldbuilding and character development in equal measure. I really enjoyed that all of the focal relationships--between Mal and Jessa, Mal and 22, and 06 and 22--are based on feelings of friendship or kinship, and not romantic love or sexual attraction. While there’s been a ton more queer representation in the genre of late, this is the first explicitly asexual/aromantic book, author, and characters I’ve encountered.

[SPOILERS AHEAD]...

I just have a couple super minor pet peeves related to character development. First, it felt unrealistic to me that Mal would not ask 22’s real name or be focused on uncovering why some kids were chosen for SecOps while others weren’t. Second, I was bothered by how 06 and 22’s relationship and their failed attempts to protect one another were explained in passing after 06’s death. It felt like there was so much unexplored potential in that relationship. Give me a whole extra prequel about their childhood together and I’d read it in one sitting!

Many thanks to NetGalley and Gallery Books for giving me advance access to this book in exchange for an honest review.

This action packed, gaming dystopia, in a world where two corporations are at war with each other and the general population has to suffer from it is good, but nothing outstanding. The cover is great, though.

Unfortunately, the whole book reads like YA in the vein of Divergent, the few added “fucks” don’t elevate it to adult Sci-Fi.

The MC is an orphan, she lost her parents in the war when she was eight. She’s an introvert, yet needs to broadcast her gaming stream to earn money. She helps strangers, but is bristly towards her friends – she shares her hotel room home with eight other people. When she finds information about one of the corporations at war, she’s the only one who … yada yada yada

Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Firebreak sounded good based on the description and the reviews out there for it. That all being said, I could not get into the book and I had to force myself to read every day to get through it.

So, the concept was okay, but I found it difficult to get into the story, especially while they were gaming. I am a gamer, but it did not resonate with me. I think some additional insights into the character and motivations would have helped me as well.

The story is not terrible, but I think it could have been significantly better. It would be difficult for me to recommend this one to my friends.

In this thrilling cyberpunk novel, set in a future where every aspect of life is controlled by omniscient mega-corporations, gamer Mal stumbles onto a startling secret that threatens to unravel everything she believes, and could very well lead to the downfall of the corporations themselves. Propulsively paced and filled to the brim with engaging sci-fi ideas, Firebreak is a novel for our time, and one of the better future-spec thrillers I’ve read in a while.

I’m loathe to say much more about the plot, which is predominantly composed of a series of cascading revelations about the companies that control Mal’s life and the lives of her friends. I’ve heard Firebreak as part Ready Player One, part Black Mirror. The latter comparison makes a lot more sense to me; the comparisons to Ready Player One start and end with the fact that the main character, Mal, is a gamer in a massive multiplayer PVP shooter. Think Fortnite, but bigger. Kornher-Stace’s novel possesses a much more pervasive social consciousness than Cline’s, an awareness of the manipulative strategies of control inherent in the platform that grant it a searing anger not present in the other text.

If anything, I was most reminded of Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade: both are sci-fi novels that utilize cunningly-deployed genre tropes to critique systems of oppression and control, and both are at their core blisteringly angry stories about burning down these systems in order to build something more equitable. The great hook in The Light Brigade is time travel; here, it’s the SpecOps operatives who fight in the corporate war, advanced NPC avatars of which exist in the game Mal plays. Getting to know these operatives, whose stories are essential to the overarching narrative, was a consistent delight.

Paced like a bullet, Firebreak evolves in distinct stages that take us from the periphery of corporate power to its very center, as Mal inadvertently becomes the figurehead for a local resistance that grows in power even as the corporation does everything in its power to undermine their efforts. While it’s gut-wrenching to read about all the ways the corp attempts to beat down not just their bodies but their spirits and wills, it’s all part of the point: These companies want to own every part of you, mind, body, and soul. It would be easiest thing in the world to let them.

Anyone with even a shred of self-awareness or class consciousness is probably at least nominally aware of how these forces work in our current world. It’s easy enough to imagine Amazon, for instance, gaining the kind of control and power that the corporations have here. Certainly, if Jeff Bezos could find some way to control the water supply so that you only got to drink if you paid him, he would do it. He’s got more money than God, but more is never enough for types like him. As frustrating as that is, it’s hard to imagine a way out. Our every waking moment is lived in the context of huge corporate powers; what do we take for granted as normal that is actually obscene? A lot, I’d wager! Which is why it is, ultimately, a bit disappointing, but not surprising, when Firebreak fails offer a concrete way out.

It might be unfair to ding any book for not attempting to untangle the endless tendrils of corporate capitalist hegemony – to truly imagine a successful revolution against the all-consuming greed of a system that infects your mind by convincing you its deadly ministrations are all perfectly natural. Kornher-Stace is able to suggest a revolution via the sharing of information, but it’s hard to imagine what it looks like in the long term. Perhaps this explains why we only get a view to the beginning of the hard change: our POV is tightly bound to Mal, and revolutions (especially revolutions against the individuating consumptive impulses of capitalism) are inherently a collective, diffuse affair.

What we do get is suggestion enough that things might change. But what does the world look like after? To my mind, this is the hard part. Recognizing the problem is hard, too, for all the reasons I enumerated above. But it’s also important to have a vision of where we go from here. Firebreak stops just short of this. But again, maybe that’s fair: maybe what comes next isn’t for one writer to predict. Maybe it’s for all of us to build together.

Firebreak is a difficult book for me to review. The blurb was interesting to me and I looked forward to reading the book. However, I just couldn’t get into it for maybe the first 70%. I honestly kept reading only because I felt like I needed to complete it to write a review. I also always finish a book I start, one reason being I’m naively optimistic it will get better by the end.

And this one did get better by the end. It was just a little too late for me to recommend to others. I’d have liked the main characters to have a bit more depth to their backstories. I would have also liked a bit more world building. I also found myself losing interest in all the times they were in the game mode.

Overall, I’d give this one 2.5 stars. It’s not bad, it just couldn’t have been a lot better. In the end, I’m disappointed. This might work as a TV show, where they can build off the novel.

Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Firebreak has some similarities to Ready Player One and to The Hunger Games, but it is darker and more emotionally grueling. Wow, this dystopian novel grabbed me by the heart and would not let go. There is a lot of action, but the interpersonal relationships are at the core of the story. This is a book about friendship, courage, risk, and survival. There is a very strong anti-capitalist message here, particularly in regard to large corporations and their manipulation of the masses. While I am not aligned with this viewpoint, it does suit the storyline, and the writing is so damned good that I didn't feel I was being proselytized by the author. This is only the second book I've read this year that I can truly say I loved. I will read it again, but I need some time to decompress from the intense experience of the first reading.

Firebreak: an area of reduced fuel load which will reduce the intensity of a fire to allow for more effective combating. In a world where two corporations control water and the cities by non-stop fighting, the people are distracted by the "bread an circuses of an AI game. The game's stars are celebrity-caliber fighters created by the Stellaxis corporation whose real-life analogs are superhuman, lab-created SpecOps warriors. Mal and Jessa are a bad-ass team of small-time gamers who stumble across one of these in-game, whose actions caught on their stream leads to their hiring by a woman who says the SpecOps are really children who Stellaxis kidnapped an manipulated years ago. Mal and Jessa use their newly- famous stream to investigate, driving Mal into an intrigue of battle, loyalty, accessibility and anticapitalism.


5/5 stars
Recommended if you enjoy
Naomi Klein
Ready Player One
Enders Game
best friends
gamelit

Jesus. I cannot say enough good things about this book. WHY ISN'T EVERYWHERE? It's been 5 days since I finished it, and honestly, I still can't get all my thoughts into coherency. I haven't stopped thinking about it. I'll be going about my day thinking I'm fine and suddenly, I'll remember 22 and will double over with emotion. I loved it so much, I've rushed out to get a copy because I need it on my bookshelf. I want to read it again and again, just so I can try to pick up on things I might've missed (but also because I'm that in love with it). It's my absolute favorite book of the year so far, and I don't foresee any other book topping it. So good. SO GOOD.

Wow, this was brilliant! If Snow Crash and Ready Player One had a baby that grew up to be an anti-capitalist activist. Implicit aro/ace (the MC, per the author) and non-binary rep (characters with they/them pronouns).

A dystopian future where water costs $1 per ounce and trying to procure your own water via rain is considered an act of terrorism. Mal, the MC, and her pals team up to take a stand against the tyrannical corps that run the US. Featuring: a sprawling MMORPG, giant "citykiller" mechs, superhumans, and lots of bullets.

Highly recommend this for all cyberpunk fans.

Corporations rule the world and the citizens are kept under their control in a distopian future full of water rationing and bombings. But everyone seems to have access to all the video games and social media they want. Mallory and her friend Jessa discover that the supersoldier operatives in a war game weren’t created in a lab as the players have been told, instead they are actually the adult versions of orphans stolen as children. Mallory believes that by exposing this lie she can bring down the corporations.

I can’t relate to the idea of playing war games, and I know nothing about gaming in general. The beginning of this book was written in a gaming language that I do not speak and don’t particularly want to learn. Although I ignored most of the game, I did manage to follow the plot, which was really pretty simple. Neither the world building nor the character development was strong. My favorite characters were the operatives and I don’t think the book actually needed Mallory. The operatives seemed capable of handling things themselves. This book was just ok for me, but then I don’t think that I am the intended audience.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

‘[H]eroes, . . . of nothing they were expected to be . . . . The beginning, I hope, of the changes to come. A spark that starts a fire of our own.’

‘It’s a nice thought anyway.’

About:

‘Two corporations have replaced the US, splitting the country’s remaining forty-five states (five have been submerged under the ocean) between them: Stellaxis Innovations and Greenleaf. . . . . New Liberty City is the only amalgamated city split between the two megacorps, and thus at a perpetual state of civil war as the feeds broadcast the atrocities committed by each side.’

My Thoughts:

FIREBREAK is a Science Fiction Thriller depicted as a mix between READY PLAYER ONE and BLACK MIRROR—a bonafide Fangirl of the latter and future reader of the former; I couldn't wait to dive into FIREBREAK!

That Ending—My Heart!

The narrative is a bit of a slow build, with some repetitive parts within, likely cut or trimmed in the final editing process. The version I read is an unedited ARC.

The storyline, gameplay, and real-life tension in this futuristic setting held my interest to the point when during the wee hours of the morn, when my eyes screamed for the last call, my mind pleaded for just one more page until my dreams started to meld into the storyline.

You ever done that?

Wake up and say, ‘That’s not part of the book!’

Or my favorite, waking up abruptly in bed because you fell asleep and your eReader slammed into your nose.

Just me?

K

FIREBREAK—Recommend!

Thank you, NetGalley and Saga Press (Simon & Schuster), for loaning me an eGalley of FIREBREAK in the request for an honest review.

This book gave me total Ready Player One vibes and just like RP1 it was fun and easy to read. HOWEVER you are not reading the same book by any means.

In this book you focus mostly on the heroine (Mallory) and her friend taking down corporation in a dystopia world setting in VR world. But don't worry you do not need to be a "gamer" in order to pick up this book. I loved the sci-fi aspect of this stand alone so so much. Any book that feels like it could HAPPEN in real life is a win for me -even if the circumstance is horrifying- and in this book you really feel that. Mallory WAS the character for this book. I swear she is a real girl ready to take anything thrown at her.
If you enjoy a good sci-fi read and want to dabble in a bit of game background then PLEASE pick this up.

Now with that being said it was not my FAV read. I think there were a few flaws although the writing is brilliant and I felt like the world wasn't descript enough for me to visualize me there like I can in other. Still a 4 star read!

New Liberty City, 2134. The United States has been replaced with two warring corporations, Stellaxis Innovations and Greenleaf. New Liberty City is at the center of the corporations properties and thus is in a state of perpetual battle. When she’s not working up to seven other jobs, Mallory is streaming Stellaxis’s wargame, SecOps on BestLife. She spends more time in virtual reality than actual reality, and she does it all for the water rations. She’s always thirsty. One day in game, by chance she spots one of the game’s rare super-soldiers, and it changes her life. First, there’s a potential sponsor deal that is more than it seems, then she starts meeting more super-soldiers and begins to uncover a potentially dangerous and sobering truth about the world she’s grown up in, and what the corporations are really capable of.

This one’s classified as adult sci-fi, but it read more like a YA novel to me, and I mean that in the best possible way. It was fast-paced, full of twists and turns with a hint of romance that didn’t totally ruin the rest of the story for me. I split my time between the print and audio version of this one just so I could mainline it even more quickly while I couldn’t read the physical copy.

There’s plenty in here reminiscent of Ready Player One and other dystopian works such as Cyberpunk 2077, but the characters make it unique. I was rooting for Mal 100%, even when I thought she made dumb decisions and wanted to smack her. That’s the beauty of characters in these types of books, they’re flawed and messy and just trying to figure it out, and you root for them all the way.

If you’re into nerd sci-fi with corruption and a messy heroine who has no idea how to save the day, check this one out. It’s a fun summer read.

This is a fast paced, action filled adventure that at times reminded me of Ready Player One but was much more gritty and dystopian. Even better though was the main characters were almost all women and they all kicked ass.

The streaming part was probably the most interesting to me. I still don't really understand the point of having the operatives in the game and why people were flocking to them but otherwise it made for some very interesting character development as you watch Mal go from a nobody to a viral internet celebrity.

I wish we could have gotten more interaction with 22 and 06 in the real world. While what was happening to them was of course tragic, Mal's obsession with 22 came off weirdly without anything tying her to him in some way.

Definitely a fun read though and I would highly recommend for anybody that likes gaming and dystopian novels.

First off reading Firebreak, I thought, shades of Ready Player One, until it wasn’t. Although we have a dystopian world where it’s youth play a game for sponsors, gifts and money, there is much more. This world is divided by two corporations who control everything. People have several jobs just to survive. Water is a most precious commodity that is bought and hoarded. With daily life so dire most people don’t have the time to realize the state of their world, that is until a girl named Mal interacts with a special ops super soldier in the game. Nothing will ever be the same for Mal and nothing is as it seems. Now we see people look within themselves to become heroes in their real life. Quick paced and interesting I just added earlier works by Nicole Kornher-Stace to my TBR. Thank you to Netgalley and Saga Press for the read.

I received an eARC from NetGalley for the purposes of this review.

You can tell from the very first page that Firebreak is something special. The reader is instantly transported into the world of the story in a very visceral way, and the author offers vivid details of the world without explaining everything - leaving a good number of questions unanswered - and without falling victim to over-exposition as many books in this genre do.

The stakes are high in this book, and the pace is heart-pounding - an adrenaline rush that doesn't pull punches when it comes to the emotional beats.

This is a brilliant book with a lot to say. Five stars, easily.

The author created an interesting cyberpunk'ish world in which corporations, or here two companies, control everything. This includes the resources people need to live, like water. However, to me it seemed like the revelations that came to the reader about the nefarious deeds going on were told to us rather than shown to us. In the end it felt a little hand-wavy that the protagonist reasoned out why things happened the way they did.

This is not the type of Sci-Fi I normally read, but it was enjoyable and honestly very post-apocalyptical. It was a very fine line between this could never happen and whoah we are heading for this like a freight train. As with many other reviewers I don't want to give away the main plot details, but this book was awesome. You should read it.

[I received a free advanced reader copy of this title from the publisher.]

In FIREBREAK, Nicole Kornher-Stace paints a world of ongoing apocalypse that draws clearly on real-world protest movements and the increasing militarization of the police. The ethics of child soldiers? Check. Very biting implied commentary on late-stage-capitalism? Absolutely.

But for all its timely and insightful social commentary, the novel never edges into dogmatic posturing. The characters at the novel's core make this a page-turning read that will have an impact on you long after you put down the book.

Fair warning: The main character, Mal, swears quite a bit, which apparently bothers some people (but is a very strong part of why I love her voice so much). If you don't like sweary characters, you might consider skipping this one. But you'll be missing out!

I have also seen some reviews talk about how Mal is unlikeable because she is "not nice" but that is such a bizarre comment and feels like more of a commentary on what those readers think women should and should not do and say. Mal continually goes out of her way throughout the novel to help people in need when she can. If she doesn't always do it with a smile on her face and if she doesn't put up with some character's toxic garbage, that just makes her all the more believable, likeable, and real in my obviously humble opinion.

This is absolutely my favourite book from this year so far. If you enjoy high stakes, stories that blur the lines between reality and immservive video games, and superpowered people who really just want a chance to be human, and ultimately optimistic stories where characters do the right thing against all the odds, you definitely need to read FIREBREAK.

(Fans of Kornher-Stace's earlier ARCHIVIST WASP and its sequel will be especially eager to pick this one up, but then... you already know how amazing her work is and don't need the push. You DO NOT need to have read anything else by the author to enjoy this, either.)