Marie Lu, LEGEND

Another post-apocalyptic in America YA. I really wanted to like it, but I felt a lot of it was material I'd seen before: a plague, a chase through sewers (the author says she took her inspiration partly from Les Mis, but it's a significant part of the third book of Hunger Games too), an annual Trial of the adolescents, a Trial Stadium, a fierce desire by the boy to save his younger sibling, a love-story triangle. Maybe there's simply too much post-apoc YA out there right now for anything to feel truly original. It's told in alternating viewpoints, a boy and a girl, and they are both beautiful, both exceptional in every way, the only two who scored perfectly in the Trial; they are pitted against the villain Commander Jameson, who is evil through-and-through, with a teenage sense of sarcastic humor. She "smiles again and snaps her fingers at the soldiers behind her. 'Believe me when I say I would love to stay and chat with you, but I have a training suession to lead.'" My teen daughter loved this book, as well as the next (Prodigy).