Me on Idols

Title: Idols
Author: Margaret Stohl
Release Date: July 8, 2014
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers (Hachette Book Group imprint)

The Icons came from the sky. They belong to an inhuman enemy. They ended our civilization, and they can kill us. Most of us. Dol, Ro, Tima, and Lucas are the four Icon Children, the only humans immune to the Icon's power to stop a human heart. Now that Los Angeles has been saved, things are more complicated, and not just because Dol has to choose between Lucas and Ro, the two great loves of her life. As she flees to a resistance outpost hidden beneath a mountain, Dol makes contact with a fifth Icon Child, if only through her visions. When Dol and the others escape to Southeast Asia in search of this missing child, Dol's dreams, feelings and fears collide in an epic showdown that will change more than just four lives, and stop one heart forever.

Idols is a continuing mission for the Icon Children, as they now know themselves to be, an ongoing search. A search for answers, a search for weaknesses, a search for a way to save the human race from the Idols and their insidious control. A search to save humanity.

Dol's life is filled with running and hiding, with searching and discovering. She and the others, Ro, Tima, and Lucas, are trying to find out as much as they can about the Idols so they can stop them like they did in Los Angeles. So they can take back Earth. But it certainly wears on her. The mission of theirs sounds bleak, hopeless. They are constantly hunted by the Sympas and the Idols, who will stop at nothing to continue their plans for the planet. But Dol won't stop. She can't.

Dol is certainly pulled in different directions in this book. First to the mountain, then across the Pacific Ocean to Asia, then into the jungle. Between Ro and Lucas. She has her moments of being active, of making decisions, but perhaps it's her personality that made me think everyone else was just a bit more interesting. She can be passive, which isn't always a bad thing, but she does get yanked around by Fortis quite a bit, they all do, and it would be nice to see her tell him off and take complete control.

I found the in-between chapters rather interesting. I could picture a child poking a hornet's nest with a stick, once a day, every day, for years, poking at it and poking at it, until one day it explodes in a cloud of furious insects flying straight at his face.

Emotions are important to this book. What do they mean to humanity. What do they mean to humans when confronted with alien life forms with no faces, aliens with an agenda of colonization and extermination of the planet's native life forms? They mean everything. They are what separate us from them, what drive us to rebel, to fight back, to resist until our dying breaths. No human being wants to die a slave, wants to die under the oppressive thumb of a faceless dictator. Sorrow, rage, fear, love. They are what push us to the brink in order to guarantee our survival.

It's a curious kind of second book in what I assume is a trilogy. There's so much travel, so much searching. And the truth behind their existence is so much more than what Dol and the others ever thought possible. The book ends with the biggest shock, and I'm so interested to find out what will happen next.

(I received an advance copy of this title to review from Hachette Book Group Canada.)