BZRK by Michael Grant

BZRK didn't really appeal to me the moment I saw it, but I LOVE dystopian novels so I had to give it a try.

"Set in the near future, BZRK is the story of a war for control of the human mind.  Charles and Benjamin Armstrong, conjoined twins and owners of the Armstrong Fancy Gifts Corporation, have a goal:  to turn the world into their vision of utopia.  No wars, no conflict, no hunger.  And no free will.  Opposing them is a guerrilla group of teens, code name BZRK, who are fighting to protect the right to be messed up, to be human.  This is no ordinary war, though.  Weapons are deployed on the nano-level. The battleground is the human brain.  And there are no stalemates here:  It’s victory . . . or madness.
 
BZRK unfolds with hurricane force around core themes of conspiracy and mystery, insanity and changing realities, engagement and empowerment, and the larger impact of personal choice. "

Well, basically this is what this book is about. In one corner you have a set of deformed, conjoint twins, manoeuvring their empire of nanobots. They believe that the world should be joined together, as a whole and thinking as one (lol I wonder where they got that idea ;D). In the other corner, you have a group of kids in their teens and twenties running genetically-linked biots. They are similar to nanobots but when they die, they drag their "owners" into insanity. These people make up BZRK and Lear is the mysterious force that runs the whole thing. But don't let the title of this book fool you. They can well be the bad guys in this story.

This book is probably the strangest and most disturbing I've ever read. I found myself disgusted, yet intrigued by the descriptive language used in the book. Here's a few examples:

"Vincent sent both his biots, half-crippled, but not dead just yet, no definitely not dead, straight into the confused mass of nanobots, plowed bodily into them with all the speed they could manage and kept thrashing ahead, dragging the microphages with them, scraping them off in the tangle of thrashing titanium."


Pretty heavy stuff, eh? Oh, and I also have to warn you of the language and PG14 content. But the thing is, BZRK is marketed to young adults. Come on guys, we can handle the language maturely right? And girls, don't tell me you've never read of a make out scene in a chick lit. 


Anyways, the reason I enjoyed this book was because of the well developed idea. War within a person. We human beings are so messed up, what's stopping us from waging war on the macro level? And by war within a person, I'm not just talking physical war. Throughout the story, teens working for BZRK struggle with their cruel deeds. Does the fact they seem to be fighting for the "right thing"  justify all the carnage that comes with it?


That's not to say I didn't find anything wrong with the book. There were a lot of things that could have been improved. The main one being character development. I found it really hard to connect with them as Grant tells us barely anything about them in the book. Seriously, I didn't find out a few traits of the main characters until the last 30 or so pages of the book! That was definitely frustrating. Also, the explanations of nanobots and  biots take up more than 1/3 of the book whereas Grant only spends a page or two telling us what the two organizations are fighting for. The result: Throughout the book I find myself rereading pages, chapters even because the pacing and plot distribution is so messed up.


7/10. I didn't love it but it amused me andI didn't feel like I wasted my time reading it. 


 Update: this is to acknowledge/tackle all the problems bendavis mentioned in his BZRK review (check it out, it's good :D)
1. "FREAKING VAGUE" That is SO true. This is the blurb Grant uses. Come onnnn, the blurb is  your best way to market a book and Grant writes this: 

Sighhh... It's interesting for sure, but it doesn't give any information on the plot, the characters... and there's no mention of nanobots or biots, the biggest   factor in the entire book!!!

2. The language. As I talked about earlier, BZRK is a YA thriller/sci-fi. There's going to be some ugly content. Though I do agree that f-words appear too frequently in this book, it's a.... manageable amount won't harm your innocence...if you have any. The thing is, whether we like it or not, authors believe that we teens bond with our characters more if they speak/act distastfully. Therefore, all YA fiction is a lot more inappropriate nowadays, it's not just BZRK.

K, this is really long but I just wanted to state my opinions on this book, especially after I realized ben did a review on it already.