Little, Brown Young Readers
May 7, 2013
428 pages
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Your heart beats only with their permission.Icons is a set after what is now referred to as 'The Day' when Earth suffered an invasion from the Lords, a still faceless, mostly unknown enemy. A day that killed most of the world and left the Icons towering over the world's major cities. Icons - giant, machine like things - no one can approach and everyone fears.
Everything changed on The Day. The day the windows shattered. The day the power stopped. The day Dol's family dropped dead. The day Earth lost a war it didn't know it was fighting.
Since then, Dol has lived a simple life in the countryside -- safe from the shadow of the Icon and its terrifying power. Hiding from the one truth she can't avoid.
She's different. She survived. Why?
When Dol and her best friend, Ro, are captured and taken to the Embassy, off the coast of the sprawling metropolis once known as the City of Angels, they find only more questions. While Ro and fellow hostage Tima rage against their captors, Dol finds herself drawn to Lucas, the Ambassador's privileged son. But the four teens are more alike than they might think, and the timing of their meeting isn't a coincidence. It's a conspiracy.
Within the Icon's reach, Dol, Ro, Tima, and Lucas discover that their uncontrollable emotions -- which they've always thought to be their greatest weaknesses -- may actually be their greatest strengths.
Bestselling author Margaret Stohl delivers the first book in a heart-pounding series set in a haunting new world where four teens must piece together the mysteries of their pasts -- in order to save the future.
I wish that Icons had been explained better or somehow built more fully from the beginning because I was never quite able to get into it. The Lords, Icons and everything never quite made complete sense to me. I understood that there was a day that something big happened where so many simply died, but it continued to seem abstract in a way.
The different locations, the different worlds of Icons from the Grass Mission where Dol and Ro live, to the Embassy , to a later location, are very well imagined detailed and easy to picture. Each place, especially that later place (which may or may not be spoilery to name), was very easy to picture but didn't feel bogged down in detail. I really loved that.
It was harder somehow, though, to picture them all in the same larger world. They were separate and distinct, to be sure, but it was hard to connect them at all, to bridge them them.
Likely because they whole Lords and Icons thing never really clicked for me, Icons did not ever, all come together for me. How the characters, their similarities, the Embassy, what everyone might have been planning, it lacked the impact I wanted it to have.
Three of the characters did seem to develop well as the story progressed. If the story had clicked for me, I think I would have really enjoyed their story. I do wish that Tima had more of a part in things. She had didn't feel like as much a part of things as Dol, Ro and Lucas but I liked her in the beginning and end so I wish she had been.
Despite the issues I had with the story, the possibility of things promised by the ending has me hopeful for the second book and what may happen.
Rating: 6/10
thank you to the publisher for the arc and digital galley for review
I didn't like this book as much either. And I agree that there's not a cohesive imagery of the places here as a whole. I hope her next one will be better.
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