Review: You Knew the Price by Susan Kaye Quinn

Posted February 18, 2021 by Lola in Review, Sci-Fi / 4 Comments

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You Knew the PriceYou Knew the Price (Nothing is Promised #2)
by Susan Kaye Quinn

My Rating: 4 stars

Genre: Science Fiction/ Hopepunk
Age Category: Adult
Type of romance: MF

Blurb:
The choice you make is the future you create.

Climate-driven plagues haunt humanity, and it’s Regional Director Zuri Hill-Gray’s job to keep the clean-energy grid running.

Zuri has the perfect life—a beautiful home on the Hillstead, a loving family, and a powerful job keeping the LA Basin’s grid humming. If only she didn’t see the ghost of her dead twin in the mirror. Her grief-counselor husband understands too much, her Aunties Cora and Vivian smother her to excess, and her mother can’t look at her daughter without seeing the half that’s missing. Zuri can’t begin to face her sister’s little daughter—to Ruby, Zuri is the ghost.

Which is why she’s running away to work, again, on the anniversary of her sister’s death.

Then a power engineer walks into Zuri’s office and claims someone is stealing energy from Power Island One—and they’ve tried to kill her to cover it up. The more Zuri digs, the more it’s clear someone’s been tinkering in the shut-down fusion labs. They’re going to dangerous lengths to hide it, and it’s been happening right under her nose. Which is how Regional Directors lose their jobs.

Zuri’s already lost her better half—she can’t afford to lose this, too.

You Knew the Price is the second of four tightly-connected novels in a new hopepunk series. It’s about our future, how society lives on invisible things, like electricity and trust, that are far too easy to break… and how our most difficult moments are often when we discover the only path forward is healing not just ourselves but the world.

My Review

I received a free copy from the author and voluntarily reviewed it.

You Knew the Price is the second book in this hopepunk scifi series. Where book 1 is told from Lucía’s point of view, this book switches things up and gives us Zuri as main character. I have to admit I wasn’t sure what I would think of this as I really liked Lucía and was sad to see her part of the story end. The good news is that the story doesn’t take a drastically different tone, in fact it continues just as it was and Lucía is a big part of it, but Zuri now takes the focus. And it worked really well. It feels as if the story continues, but now with a different main character and point of view.

Zuri is still struggling almost a year after her twin sister’s death, until Lucía shows up with a story that’s so far fetched and dangerous that she gives Zuri something new to focus on. It’s so sad and hard to see Zuri struggling and feel her pain, especially in the first few chapters. The beautiful part is to slowly see her heal a little bit or maybe give her grief a place and start to live again is a better way to describe it. This big plot that Lucía drags her into gives her something new to focus on and maybe even a new purpose. I liked Zuri as a main character and seeing her point of view in this book. She also has some awesome friends and family around her and I liked reading about them and how much they cared about one another. And I liked seeing more of Lucía as well, now as a side character.

I liked how the story continues right where book 1 left off. Lucía is sharing what happens with Zuri and Zuri is looking into things and getting involved as well. For a big part of the book Lucía and Zuri team up to handle this big dangerous plot. There are some big developments plot wise, where they figure out part of what’s going on and how they are managing it, as well as more danger. And this book ends things on a very good note for Zuri, while also leaving still plenty of story left to uncover in future books. I am curious to see where things go next.

I like the world Susan Kaye Quinn has created here. How alive this future is, it’s terrifying and sad to see what happened, but the hope is also there. Seeing how humans are fighting and how far the green energy has come. And how these characters are standing up to someone who is threatening it all. Some parts of the book that describe the world building can be quite intense and dense with information, but it really helps to bring the world alive.

To summarize: This was a great sequel! The switch to a new point of view character worked out well, we get a new main character to focus on and her story, while the main plot line smoothly continues on. I really liked how the author pulls this off and the main character from book 1 has a very important part still to play too and is a side character in this one. I liked getting to know Zuri and her family and friends. It was hard to read about her grief, but also great to see how she slowly comes out of her shell a bit and how the book ends on a hopeful note. There are some big developments plot wise about this dangerous plot that they’re trying to stop and some reveals as well about what’s going on. The world building is great and it really comes alive. There is a lot of information about this new future and I like how it’s both a grim image of what might be to come as well as a hopeful image of what we could achieve. All in all this was another great read in this series and I look forward to book 3!

4 Stars

Links:
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You can also read my review on Goodreads and Bookbub.

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