Book Review: Gone Rogue by Marissa Meyer & Stephen Gilpin

Gone Rogue by Marissa Meyer & Stephen Gilpin (Wires and Nerve, Volume 2) / ★★★★☆

Summary: Iko – an audacious android and best friend to the Lunar Queen Cinder – has been tasked with hunting down Alpha Lysander Steele, the leader of a rogue band of bioengineered wolf-soldiers who threaten to undo the tenuous peace agreement between Earth and Luna. Unless Cinder can reverse the mutations that were forced on them years before, Steele and his soldiers plan to satisfy their monstrous appetites with a massacre of the innocent people of Earth.

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The thing that always stands out to me about the Lunar Chronicles is the way seemingly insignificant details can come back to help save the day, and that’s just what Meyer did in this second and final installment in the Wires and Nerve series. I enjoyed this a lot, and like the volume 1, it was a lot of fun. Whereas I enjoyed the first book for the time spent getting reacquainted with the characters, I enjoyed the plot of Gone Rogue more- perhaps because Wires and Nerve felt more like an introduction, whereas this book really got into the substance of the plot.

I loved how we have our protagonist, Iko, and our villain, Steele, android and bioengineered wolf-soldier respectively, both striving toward a common goal- to gain, or regain, their humanity. And yet, the way they choose to go about it is completely different, and puts them at odds. That was interesting, and well-done, and I liked how both were very formidable threats to each other. And as always with the Lunar Chronicles, I loved how friendship came to factor into all of it.

I do think I enjoyed Wires and Nerve a bit more than Gone Rogue, and the reason for that is honestly…I missed Thorne. He just really made that first book for me, made me laugh and added a certain spark that lightened up areas that were rather bogged down by politics. But on the flip side, I really enjoyed getting to see more of Winter in this book, because she’s my favorite and she’s fantastic.

And I liked the way Kinney and Iko’s relationship progressed! It was sweet. [SPOILERS] However, I was a little disappointed that Iko was forced to get the major chunk of their relationship progression, and then kind of just…didn’t really question the place they were at when she woke up again after having her new memory chip installed. I understand the point of her forgetting Lihn Garen’s reports about her past, but it made the ending between the two of them feel slightly empty for me, and devoid of tension, with the fact that she couldn’t remember most of what the two of them had been through in these books. But! It was still sweet, and I liked Kinney’s character development, and the ending was cute. [END SPOILERS]

I have to say I enjoyed the art in Wires and Nerve more, but this was still good and entertaining and I enjoyed looking at the graphics. I sometimes found the way it was arranged on the page was a bit more creative than in volume 1.

I’m glad I finally got to these books, because they were a lot of good, lighthearted fun and relatively quick, easy reads. They reminded me of just how much I love the Lunar Chronicles and its characters, and now I kind of what to reread the series….