Someone needs a Guardian (by Alex London) and it's not me...

 

So! This post is technically a part two to my last post – the one about Proxy by Alex London (which you can read here). This post is about its sequel, Guardian, and as such this post will contain spoilers about Proxy.

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But as is tradition, the what’s my name? Blurb-yanka. It tells us that Syd is now the figurehead of a revolution that now has a bodyguard, Liam. Now, it also mentions a “post-jubilee world”, which was telling me that the jubilee sort of just happened in between books (which it did, and I will mention later.) Besides the post-jubilee world, there’s this new infectious disease going on, and then Syd basically has to find a cure, and what he discovers leaves him stunned. So, we’ve got a plot immediately, there’s this disease and Syd has designated himself to be the one to get the cure, nice and simple. Although, I did immediately notice there was no mention of Knox or Marie in this blurb, so I did wonder how present they would be, especially after the end of Proxy when Knox sacrificed himself.

In chapter one we’re introduced to the fact that there’s a disease, lovely, nice setup. But then chapter two we’re introduced to this new character, Liam, who is Syd’s bodyguard. This book is set six months after the jubilee, and as such, the world has massively changed, since the network that was keeping everyone up, running and connected is now gone. The world, while still dystopian, is giving very much more Fallout kind of dystopian now.

Now, the first thing I want to say is that I feel like these two books should honestly have been a trilogy, rather than a duology. And I say that because the world has changed so radically between the two books that they almost don’t even feel connected. They feel like two stories that just happened to be set in the same universe, and even though Syd and Marie are still there, they don’t seem like the same Syd and Marie from Proxy. And this is why I wish there would have been three books instead of two, because in this fantasy I’ve created, Guardian would have been the third book, and this second, imaginary, book would have come between Proxy and Guardian, and it would have shown us a little more of the world between these two books, and it would have shown us why Syd and Marie have changed in the ways that they have. It could have also eased Liam into the world, instead of just plopping him in. The analogy I came up with for these two books was that there wasn’t enough space for what needed to be done. I honestly think you could read either of these books on their own, without needing to read the other.

And because there wasn’t enough space, I did sort of feel like the world in this book didn’t have as much of a personality as the world from Proxy. I get that the world, and society, was only like six months old, so won’t have developed very much, but I think had there been a third book (in between the two real ones) that, like I mentioned above, could have remedied this issue, because we could have seen how the world in Guardian came to be. Like, there’s a whole new government organisation in Guardian, and I think it would have made the world so much more real had we seen how this young government was chosen or came into power. Or we could have had more focus on Marie, and how her parents were dealing with losing everything. But because we didn’t, and the world was like this… The world in Proxy felt more connected, like I could see everything, whereas the world in Guardian felt more like I was skip travelling between built up areas like you can in open world video games.

I will say, this book is actually gay at least. Whereas the first one had a hint of gay, this one gets properly gay. There’s this fight that gets Syd injured, and when he’s being patched up by the doctor, we get this hint that Liam like Syd, because Liam has this whole mentality of, he can look, but he can’t touch, since he is just Syd’s bodyguard and nothing else. And again, this is where my issue with not having a book/story between these two, because Liam and Syd’s relationship throughout this book is all very much… You know that one gif of Waka Flocka Flame where he’s just sat on a sofa, staring blankly, and just says, “…Okay?”? Their relationship kind of feels like that. And I mean that in the sense that I feel as though the action of the book was put before the relationship. Like, we know throughout that Liam likes Syd, but we don’t really see all that much reciprocation from Syd until the very end, and he doesn’t really even think about Liam romantically either, so it was very much, “…Okay?” when it happened. And had we had that other book between the actual two, like I mentioned above, we could have been introduced to Liam earlier, and their feelings could have been left to simmer for longer, making the actual point they get together so much better.

What I will give this book, action. There was action aplenty, and I think that was a really good choice, given that the whole vibe of this book was more raw, more feral, it made sense for the characters, and the world, to be more violent. And it worked. It also captured the real helpless, grody feeling in certain areas of the world. I noticed that it also followed a pretty similar structure to Proxy in that the first 100 pages or so are quite slow, the set-up, if you will? But then once those first 100 pages are over, in a sense, it’s almost non-stop.

My biggest thing with this book is that I wanted more of it. And, to repeat myself again, had this been a trilogy, instead of just two books, I think I’d have been able to get what I was after. I think Guardian suffered from wanting to fit too much content into not enough space, and that just ended up leaving me a little disappointed, like I don’t even fully feel like the characters got to finish their arcs.

I want it to be known that the content of the book is not bad, like, it wasn’t poorly written or anything, and I didn’t finish the book thinking it was a bad book. It just disappointed me. Sadly, I didn’t enjoy Guardian nearly as much as I did Proxy. If Proxy was The Hunger Games movie, then Guardian was one of the Divergent movies.

Okay, bye!