Title: GAMES OF GREED
Author: Jo Stewart Wray
Pages: 167
Genre: GENERAL FANTASY
Reviewer: Kirkus Indie

In Wray’s YA SF novel, a girl in a pandemic-scarred future is forced to compete against other young people in a robot-patrolled underground complex.

A deadly “Silver Sickness” has sent much of humanity into lockdown in a society patrolled by robots who look like walking hazmat suits. Wade Johnson, the governor of Mississippi, institutes a lottery that selects kids for compulsory entrance into the Governor’s Underground School. There, children entertain the masses in lockdown by competing in televised physical and mental competitions, involving such things as debates, martial arts, and even actual, working magic. Supposedly, victorious kids and their families get a vaccine, but the deal seems fishy to Sara Freeman, a bright 16-year-old whose researcher dad was seeking a cure for the Silver Sickness before the illness killed him. Sara soon realizes that the governor oversees lucrative gambling based on outcomes of the games, and the teachers are also in on it—and Johnson also has other evil schemes to make money. This is a very much an à la carte YA-dystopia narrative that picks and chooses from familiar sources. The plot, which also draws on real-life Covid-19 fears, owes much to The Hunger Games, although it seems pitched to a younger readership. The out-of-left-field magic angle even name-checks a spell book from the Harry Potter mythos as well as its compiler Bathilda Bagshot, although the Potterverse is declared to be fictional. Even so, Sara finds a successful invisibility spell from the grimoire that figures heavily into the latter narrative. There’s a hint of a Lemony Snicket–style Reptile Room, as well, full of nasty creatures. However, in refreshing departures from familiar YA tropes, Sara does not have to choose between two broodingly handsome fellows as boyfriend material, and a providential seismic event calls to mind the works of H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs. A YA pandemic tale that gene-splices elements of several works, sometimes to unexpected effect.