Review: One Breath, One Bullet (The Borders War) by S.A. McAuley
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 08 18, 2013
Very strange novel, with an original approach that I'm still thinking about; I didn't want to write a review soon after I finished the book cause I wanted to think about it, I wanted to find a way to convey the feeling. The author doesn't introduce her characters, they are actually presented to you with a bag of events you don't know; the author will jump back and forward in their life until you will have all the elements to put together the pieces of the puzzle, but again, you will have to do that by yourself. The second thing I notice is that, in this post-apocalypse future, time is inconsistent and they are distances; in the course of few pages, the characters spend together almost 20 years, starting as barely legal soldiers to end as pushing 40 revolutionaries. The strangest thing of all is that for all those 20 years they are at the same time lovers and worst enemies, always at the opposite fronts. When it was war, they were fighting against each other, when it was (barely) peace time, they were competing against each other at the Olympics. But do not imagine Olympic Games as you know them, the Olympics in this story are dark and horrific, more like the Roman arenas where gladiators were fighting to death.Anyway expect the unexpected from this story, do not expect linearity, wait for the turn of the tables; the only constant is that Merq and Armise love each other... to death.Warning: this one was quick and the introduction to a series, The Borders War, so there is an hanging ending.