Girl in the Arena

I really love this cover and the image
the girl give. Plus her outfit is amazing!

When the Vietnam War was going on, one man decided that he wanted to start a Neo-Gladiator competition because his son was killed during the war - a war that his son didn't want to be a part of. For 70 some years, the Neo-Gladiator competition has been thriving, getting more intense and more harsher every year until now there can be a competition to the death - not something that was looked at lightly when it was first created.

It is now 2009, and Lyn is a daughter of 7 gladiators. Her mother has married 7 gladiator competitors and every husband has died before their contract was done. Allison, her mother, is known as a Gladiator Wife and in the rules for Gladiators, a Gladiator Wife can only marry 7 Gladiators. Then she will be a widow for life. This has never happened - until Lyn's 7th father dies in the ring against Uber, a young, new Gladiator.

When her father, Tommy, died, he was wearing Lyn's bracelet that her 1st father gave to her, her courtship bracelet. The rule about her bracelet is that is anyone else becomes in possession of it, a male, he will have the right to marry the owner of the bracelet. Uber grabbed it when he killed Tommy, so now she is supposed to marry Uber, her father's murderer.

Lyn doesn't know what to do. She doesn't want to marry Uber. She doesn't want to be a Gladiator's Wife - because her mother has been it all of her life, Lyn sees the outcome of that life and swore she would stay away from that.

So now she has a decision: She either marries Uber or she fights against him in the arena - something no woman has been able to do and survive as of yet.

This was a great novel - it's definitely something I've never read before. Don't think that this is the same as Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins - it's not. Lyn lives in a dystopian world of today's time. All of the actions from the Vietnam War to 9/11 have occurred and have influenced the Gladiator competitions based on the events that have happen to society. There is still New York City, everything environmentally is the same as we know it today. They just happen to have Gladiators and competitions to the death, and other, more advanced technology that can replicate a person.

I've been wanting to read this for awhile, and even though it's not my favorite book, it was very well written and the author definitely created a different perspective of the world that we know today with just a few twist and turns to make it a different society than what we know of.