When I saw and heard about this book being a cross between Ready Player One and Black Mirror, I was all psyched to check it out, but it ended up being a little disappointing for me personally. It was too much of a dark apocalyptic type feel to it for me also.
This does have some good parts to it and I did like it some. It's about a girl, Mal with her friend, Jessa, and how they have to find work, do whatever they can to make ends meet to be able to buy the bare necessities for life like water. Part of how they come into hitting the jackpot where they get a bunch of money, supplies including a lot of water is because of their live streaming in the game and while they're doing this they discover through talking to some other people corruption in the game and with all the big businesses that are in charge, Stellaxis and Greenleaf. What they find is very disturbing, to say the least when they go looking into the corruption. The last half of the book is when it started to get a little more interesting and pick up, but I struggled to read and finish this book because it was not quite what I expected, there was a bit more of a bleak world, etc. and a lot more profanity than I usually like to read.
If you like dystopian reads or this author, you'll probably like it more than I did so make sure to put this on your list. Thanks to NetGalley and Gallery/Saga Press for letting me read and review this book. All opinions are my own. ( )

Kornher-Stace, Nicole. Firebreak. Saga Press, 2021.
Firebreak gives us a world run by two competing corporations that keep the populace in place by keeping bread scarce with artificial shortages and circuses plentiful with a pervasive holographic game. New Liberty City runs on a rationed water economy. One way for the poor to get enough water is to build an audience by filming their action in a noir urban story set in a virtual overlay of their own slum. Mal and her friend Jessa are beginning to build an audience by tracking some agents generated by the game, when they make a discovery that could threaten the corporate hegemony. The world is original, and the friendship between Mal and Jessa is fully developed, but the action is sometimes hard to hang onto. The novel is listed as a standalone, and plot issues are finally resolved, but the world is large enough to generate more stories. 3.5 stars rounded up because I think Cory Doctorow would really like its take on the corporate state. ( )

http://speculiction.blogspot.com/2021/05/review-of-firebreak-by-nicole-kornher.h... ( )

I was so pumped when I was granted a copy from Netgalley. TYSM! I started it right away and burned through it.

- Spoiler free review -

It was written in a way that kept me turning pages. I had to know what was causing these people to be living in this type of dystopian world. For me, I would call it a mystery. Not a 'whodunit mystery', but a 'why is this happening mystery' that had me dying to figure it out.

There is a Virtual Reality world but it isn't the kind where you enter the avatar of an Orc or Fae and do quests. Our MC uses VR as income versus pleasure, streaming their time in the war game as they try to reach the leader board and make rare discoveries. This give them income, store credits and an audience which is a great form of communication in this dystopian world.

A few complaints, one would be that I didn't understand how they interacted with the virtual world. No keyboards, no sensors following your body movements. Seems like they lie in bed and their implants and eye lens are able to accomplish so much. I found that a bit unrealistic or maybe incomplete in details. I also didn't understand how life got so bad. We were told it was because the competing companies that owned America were warring but the citizens where our MC lives, seem to be worse off than most. Why are the citizens of Old Town suffering so much more so, than the neighboring areas? [ETA: I am remembering that early in the book they said that both of the companies had headquarters there so there was a lot more tension than in other areas] And maybe my last complaint is that the author repeated herself quite a bit. Many details were on repeat and as mentioned above other details could have been expanded on.

Our MC was refreshing. She is aromantic and asexual. Her orientation is a non-issue and not discussed but you get a good sense of it. It is awesome to have all her great traits come through without having them take backseat to the hunt for a sexual relationship in the story.

The author is definitely talented, she created a multi-layered story and I will be hunting for her past work and keeping an eye on her future work.
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author blog post: http://nicolekornherstace.com/2021/05/11/so-firebreak-has-been-out-a-week-today/ ( )

In FIREBREAK, by Nicole Kornher-Stace, the future is divided between to warring corporations. One of the only ways to scrape by is playing SecOps, a popular online war game where users are trying to crack the top of the ranks and then cash in on their performance and notoriety. Mallory and her best friend Jessa are mildly successful at the game and stream their online play daily. When they stumble upon one of the celebrity supersoldiers in the game, they are offered a new job to continue looking for and interacting with other celebrity supersoldiers in the game. But as quickly as that offer comes up, Mallory's world starts crashing down around her and she doesn't know who to trust and who to ask for help. Along with Jessa and her other roommates, Mallory has to not only figure out how to survive, but look for a way to make the world a better place in the process.
The dystopian future that Korner-Stace is not only plausible, but a logical place where to the world could be heading, where corporate dominance has power over government to the point that the business is the government. Mallory's universe, where she lives in a hotel room with many roommates and water is a expensive and hard to acquire commodity, quickly sets the table for what is going on in the real world. The book transitions between real-world and online world often, and Kornher-Stace does a masterful job of seamlessly travelling between the two. Without slowing down or feeling deliberate, the reader is introduced to Mallory and the other prominent characters in the beginning of the book, but the right amount of action is mixed in so it doesn't feel like the reader is just wading through the exposition before the story begins. As the book progresses, the stakes get higher and higher until the point where I felt my pulse quickening in the last couple of chapters.
Techno-thrillers are a difficult beast of genre to write in. You have to create three dimensional, likable characters, designing a world that doesn't exist and make it believable, and devise a plot that is exciting and fun to read. In FIREBREAK, Kornher-Stace has done all three and done it quite well.
Thank you to Gallery/Saga Press, Nicole Kornher-Stace, and Netgalley for a copy of this book is exchange for an honest review! ( )