Review: Trance by Kelly Meding

Trance
(Meta Wars #1)
By: Kelly Meding
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: Oct 25, 2011
Genre: Urban Fantasy
Rating:

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Fifteen years ago, Teresa “Trance” West was a skilled telepath and a proud member of the Ranger Corps. But ever since the Rangers were inexplicably rendered powerless at the climax of the devastating Meta War, she’s bounced from one dead-end job to another. Now her powers have reappeared just as mysteriously as they vanished— only they’re completely transformed and more potent than ever. And they’re threatening to destroy her.

Trance heads to Los Angeles to track down the surviving Rangers and discover who restored her powers—and why—but a phantom enemy is determined to kill them before they can reassemble. As they dodge his deadly attacks and come to terms with their new role as heroes, Trance and the rest of the team set out to annihilate the sinister madman . . . only to discover their own powers are his greatest weapons.

 

This is the first book by Kelly Meding’s that I have read and I must say that I am a huge fan of hers right now. This book is pretty much like X-men but so much better. Meta’s are humans with super powers and there is both a good side (Ranger Corp) and a bad side (Banes) within the superhuman race and they are at war with each other.

The book starts off with the final battle between the Banes and Ranger Corp 15 years ago, the day the Meta’s lost their power. It took me a minute to get my bearing because the book starts off with a mans face melting off and someone called Mayhem chasing them. So right away you are thrown into the action of the fight. The attention to detail that the author put into her work is really something. No wonder it was 16 years in the making. You are instantly sucked in and you feel for the characters. Especially after they get their powers back and set out to find the other children from the Ranger Corp only to find that some of them have either been killed or attacked by the main enemy Specter. This isn’t a book where everyone lives happily ever after and that is probably one of the things that I really liked about it. Some of the team members die in combat or even before they can find each other after getting their powers back.

However, I did like the romance between Gage and Teresa. Even at the beginning of the book when Teresa is recounting the last fight before they lost their powers, she talks about her crush on Gage then. She even uses her power on him when he is afraid, to give him the courage that he needed to continue to lead them as kids in hopes of survival. So I liked that her and Gage are the first ones to meet up afterwards in the book. He has lost a lot of people in his life and he is very worried about losing Teresa as well and so he sort of keeps himself at a distance for most of the book.

“I seem to remember a terrified little girl giving me the courage to lead. I would have fallen apart without you.” -Gag