These Rebel Waves by Sara Raasch

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Skillfully written heart gripping story of faith, politics, and prejudice

This was a very surprising read for me, because I did not expect to like it this much. First of all, I hardly ever like YA. Second of all, I don’t enjoy reading about politics and intrigues. And yet this book held me interested all the way through to the very end.
The writing is very good. The world is interesting and comprehensively built, even if small. And more importantly, characters feel true, their emotions and motivations clear and compelling. It was very easy to feel with them and for them, and never once I felt like they’ve been stupified, as I so often do with YA.
This is not a light story, it is full of blood, intrigues and betrayal. There are fanatics, religious or political, there’s torture, death, child soldiers, and the main characters have to fight for things that are so much larger than them, and against things that are so much larger the them. I liked that the ideas of right and wrong, of learning to see things from different sides, of reacting to changing circumstances no matter how painful the situation is to believe in, are in the heart of this book. This book kept me tense a lot of time, and even when I didn’t really want to be reading something that made me feel so tense, I still couldn’t put it down.
I’ll be looking forward to and dreading the sequel.

Although, I don’t know who decided to market it as a book about ‘gay pirates’ (which I learned after skimming through the first page of goodreads reviews), but it was clearly a mistake. This is not in any way ‘a book about gay pirates’.
It is worth a read though, regardless.




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