Review: The Lure by Lynne Ewing

Title: The Lure

Author: Lynne Ewing

Publisher: Balzer + Bray

Publication Date: 2.11.2014

Pages: 288

Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Issues, Gangs

Series: No

Source: ARC from publisher

Rating: 3 Stars

Summary (from Goodreads):

Fifteen-year-old Blaise Montgomery lives in the gritty outskirts of Washington, DC, where a stray bullet can steal a life on the way to school. Drugs and violence are the only ways to survive, so Blaise and her friends turn to gangs for safety, money, and love. When Blaise is invited to join Core 9, one of the most infamous crews, she jumps at the chance. Though her best guy friends, Rico and Satch, warn her about the danger, she agrees to be beaten for a minute straight as part of the gang's initiation ritual.

Now Blaise is finally part of a crew. A family.

But things get only more dangerous when she becomes a member of Core 9 and tensions with a rival gang heat up. Trek, the head of Core 9, asks Blaise to be his "lure," the sexy bait he'll use to track down enemy gang members and exact revenge. Rico and Satch tell her it's a death sentence, but Blaise can't resist the money and unparalleled power. As Trek puts Blaise in increasingly dangerous situations, she begins to see that there's more to lose than she ever realized-including Satch, the one person who has the power to get under her skin. With death lurking around every corner, should Blaise continue to follow the only path she's ever known, or cut and run?

Review:

I was so excited to learn about this book. I love gritty, emotional stories that deal with real life issues, especially when set in my own backyard. OK, so DC is a more like a 2 hour drive, but still! Lynne Ewing lured me in with THE LURE.

From the beginning you knew things were only going to get worse for our heroine. Blaise is a tough girl, struggling to find her place in a crazy world that she has no escape from. My heart twisted at what she had to go through—from the horrific ways girls are initiated into the gang (either being jumped in or pulling a train—and I don’t mean a locomotive) to the sad way she lived in squalor with the grandmother. It’s a brutal, terrifying world that all too many teens live in.

But then things started to go south, and not for Blaise, but for the book. What started as a hard-hitting, pull no punches book about gang life turned into some fantastical, wildly outrageous story that wasn’t believable at all. Things started to decline around the middle point of the book and once we were sliding downhill, there was no stopping the inevitable train wreck at the bottom.

I gave this book 3 stars because the beginning was brilliantly written. It’s truly a shame that the book devolved into something I typically see on daytime soap operas. It was so far-fetched ridiculous that I could only sigh and shake my head. I do recommend trying this one, if for nothing except the beginning, especially if you’re unfamiliar with inner city gangs and gang culture.

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