The Scorpion Rules
by Erin Bow
Summary from Goodreads:
Greta is a duchess and
crown princess—and a hostage to peace. This is how the game is played:
if you want to rule, you must give one of your children as a hostage. Go
to war and your hostage dies.
Greta will be free if she can survive until her eighteenth birthday. Until then she lives in the Precepture school with the daughters and sons of the world’s leaders. Like them, she is taught to obey the machines that control their lives. Like them, she is prepared to die with dignity, if she must. But everything changes when a new hostage arrives. Elián is a boy who refuses to play by the rules, a boy who defies everything Greta has ever been taught. And he opens Greta’s eyes to the brutality of the system they live under—and to her own power.
As Greta and Elián watch their nations tip closer to war, Greta becomes a target in a new kind of game. A game that will end up killing them both—unless she can find a way to break all the rules.
Greta will be free if she can survive until her eighteenth birthday. Until then she lives in the Precepture school with the daughters and sons of the world’s leaders. Like them, she is taught to obey the machines that control their lives. Like them, she is prepared to die with dignity, if she must. But everything changes when a new hostage arrives. Elián is a boy who refuses to play by the rules, a boy who defies everything Greta has ever been taught. And he opens Greta’s eyes to the brutality of the system they live under—and to her own power.
As Greta and Elián watch their nations tip closer to war, Greta becomes a target in a new kind of game. A game that will end up killing them both—unless she can find a way to break all the rules.
I love the idea of hostage royalty--that this holds accountable the people that rule the world. Even though it doesn't always work, this is a great new twist on dystopia. Bow even weaves in Artificial Intelligence and other tech. You know from the beginning that there will be romance between Greta and Elian, but Greta knows her duty, so for most of the book, she remains stoic and avoids those temptations.
I highly suggest this book to fans of The Maze Runner or the Matched series!
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