Book Review: Wires and Nerve Vol. 2 by M. Meyer et al.

Wires and Nerve Volume 2: Gone Rogue written by Marissa Meyer and art by Stephen Gilpin

See my review of Volume 1 here.

On the eve of a festival to celebrate the peace agreement between Earth and the Moon, a group of rogue soldiers threaten to create chaos. The evil Lunar queen had bioengineered wolf-men as soldiers, giving them an appetite for destruction and human flesh. New Lunar Queen Cinder has given her android friend Iko the task of hunting down the rogue soldiers. Now that the war is over, they want to be reverse-engineered back into regular men. Lunar science has no ability to do that, but Alpha Steele, leader of the wolf-rogues, refuses to believe Queen Cinder. He wants a cure or he wants revenge.

The story centers on Iko, who deals with her own artificial nature as well as kicks wolf-butt. The large cast of characters from Meyer's Lunar Chronicles are all present and help to fill out the story. The people are fun and the plot is interesting enough to support the action and the jokes. There's a little too much interest in dresses and the festival ball for my taste. The book wasn't really written for me, it's more of a YA science fiction romance. Even so I enjoyed the story.

Recommended.

Book Review: Wires and Nerves Vol. 1 by M. Meyer et al.

Wires and Nerves Volume 1 written by Marissa Meyer and art by Doug Holgate with Stephen Gilpin

A band consisting of a mutant, a cyborg, an android, and some humans have successfully led a revolt against the Lunar queen and put the rightful queen (a teenager and the aforementioned cyborg whose name is Cinder) on the throne. That's good news because it ended the war between the Moon and the Earth. But there's still some problems, like the army of genetically-altered wolf-human hybrids the evil queen sent to subjugate the Earth. Small packs of the army still wander around terrorizing (and eating) locals. Queen Cinder has sent the aforementioned android (named Iko) as a secret agent to take out the wolf packs one by one. Hopefully the situation will be settled enough that Cinder can safely attend attend a festival and ball which the Earth emperor (one of the aforementioned humans and quite the hottie) will attend.

The story is a continuation of a Young Adult fantasy series called The Lunar Chronicles. I had no idea when I selected the book, I just saw it in the "new graphic novels" section on the library web site and liked the cover and the title (there must be some sci fi robot story called "Nerves of Steel" somewhere, right?). The series reimagines classic fairy tales in a science fiction setting, thus Cinder is based on Cinderella, though she is her own character and not just Cinderella in Space. This particular story has a bit more focus on dresses and romance than I was expecting, so those parts of the story stuck out for me. On further reflection, the storytelling is balanced between action, romance, and political intrigue. No element is particularly deep or new, but together they make a fun story.

Recommended.