Authority
by: Jamie Krakover
August 20, 2024 Snowy Wings Publishing
352 pages
Review by: E. Broderick
It’s always nice to revisit an old friend – unless of course that friend turns out to be the most complicated part of your life. In Authority, the sequel to Jamie Krakover’s YA sci- fi Tracker220, readers will be pleased to catch up with main character Kaya Weiss and learn how she is faring after bringing down the tracker network that allowed the authorities an unprecedented ability to not only monitor people, but also to control them. However, readers will also get to revisit a less beloved friend – Kaya’s tracker is working again. Several other trackers are also working in highly undesirable ways. Kaya and crew must figure out who is exploiting the supposedly dormant devices and how to stop them.
Per usual, I found Kaya’s taste in men to be very suspect. I did not care for her ex, and I do not care for her currently boyfriend or the way either of these guys treats her. Possibly this has to do with my overall aversion to large doses of testosterone, especially when it comes to jealousy. However, when the tracker network is activated once again by someone trying to manipulate people, Kaya herself shows lapses in judgement far more egregious than her dating choices. She trusts some people too quickly while at the same time rushing off and attempting to fix things on her own in order to try and spare those she loves. Meanwhile the reader is left yelling at their e-reader, reminding her you can’t trust sociopaths (OK maybe just this reader, but still). There’s a lot of room for growth here from almost all the characters – and they do so over the course of the book.
What I really enjoyed was Kaya’s complicated relationship with her father. When we learn that all the shenanigans in the last book were due to Mr. Weiss giving his daughter a special gift and then completely neglecting to tell her about it or the resulting danger it puts her in, readers are understandably miffed at the guy. It’s nice to learn that Kaya is too. She and her father have to hash it out over the next few pages and what results is also a microcosm of one of the larger questions of the book – how much do we shield others instead of letting them make their own choices and what price are we willing to pay in either direction? Turns out a universe without trackers isn’t quite the utopia everyone thought it would be. But life with them wasn’t so great either.
The most delightful bit in the book has to do with an artificial intelligence. I do not approve of AI in the writing process or in the cover design process, but I am very open to them as plot devices in sci fi! Authority is human written and human designed and I enjoyed seeing what actual uses Krakover could come up with for the AI character in her book. Here’s a hint- it has nothing to do with replacing humans. If current humans could take a leaf from her book maybe we’d actually use this technology in ways that benefit people.
The title Authority is apt- authority and who should wield it over another, is indeed the question the reader is thinking about as the book closes. Who gets to set the rules and why? How do we monitor that process? It’s a timely question that I hope will lead young readers to engage thoughtfully on this topic.
Note: BookishlyJewish received an e-arc of this book from the author