In Pia's home city, the Game is all that matters. Winning games gives you the de facto currency needed to survive, and if you fail as a player, you are relegated to a low status life of service jobs or exiled to a life of servitude outside the city. When Pia's grandfather's game rank falls below the minimum (he can't afford the new glasses he needs to be a competitive player) and he is taken away by the policing automatons of the city, Pia is determined to use her own skills as a game player to win enough to bring him home again. But it's a ridiculously large amount of game credit; even if she never loses, it would take years.
Except that wining the annual Great Game of Noctis would take care of it all. And so when she meets Vittoria, a girl her own age with a brash confidence in her gaming skill, who offers her a place on the team she's assembling to compete in the Game of Noctis, Pia says yes. Even though Noctis is a deadly game, played with Death herself as a piece on the board.
Vittoria's team, the Seafoxes, are underdogs in a competition dominated by the wealthy, but each member brings their particular skills beautifully to bear. And each has their own reason for needing to win, and their own journeys that have brought them to this point. But the Game of Noctis turns out to be rigged--those who have power and privilege are perfectly happy to bend to rules to keep it.
Pia and her teammates must question the underpinnings of their world if they are going to win. But challenging the status quo can be just as dangerous as playing games with Death herself. (And Death really is a real "person" who Pia meets outside of the game, giving extra fantasy depth to the story).
It was a tremendously entertaining read, with just the right amount of detail about the various matches in the Great Game--enough to make it all wonderfully clear without being pages of unbroken description. The characters to are allowed to reveal themselves and their stories gradually, so the reader gets to know them as real people alongside Pia, instead of them being intro-dumped. It was really well done!
I have to confess the premise of the world's economy built on game victories was initially hard for me to accept. But revelations about how it works, which are slowly revealed to both the characters and the reader, made it all make sense by the time it was ready to be blown to bits!
Highly recommended, in particular to fantasy readers who like games and competitions along with a touch of magic, and who are eager to cheer on a revolution. It's easy to imagine wanting to re-read it.
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