The RIB: The Atlantis Grail #1: Qualify by Vera Nazarian
Earth is in danger!
A giant meteor is going to crash into our planet, destroying all life. Luckily, the space-faring Atlantean civilisation is here to help. They used to be an ancient civilisation on Earth, thousands of years ago, before they developed spaceships and left to settle another planet. How are they going to help? Well, the Atlanteans can take immigrants from Earth back to their new planet. Except they have limited room, and only want teenagers between the ages of eleven and twenty. And only the best. So to figure out who will live on Atlantis, and who will die on Earth when the meteor strikes, the government of Earth and the Atlanteans agree to hold a tournament, where the teenagers will fight to survive! (Why don't the Atlanteans just move the asteroid? They have spaceships, after all. This is addressed in later books, but now we'll get on to the exciting bit.)
I have a fondness for tournament stories. The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, or even movies like Cube and the Saw franchise (I recommend 1, 3, and 6). Anything where the protagonists have to risk everything against each other, defeat traps and attempt to succeed at impossible odds. I picked up this book because I wanted to read about a cool tournament story.
Our main heroine is Gwenevere (Gwen Lark), a clumsy girl who's desperate to save her siblings and family. What's nice about the book is that prior to the deathmatches beginning, the students go through a bunch of classes together, learning about the Atlantean civilisation so there's time to build up relationships and characters. Gwen's also assigned to a Divergent-style faction, based on a personality test. Although her colour, Yellow, gets a net as a weapon whereas the blue faction gets a gun. (Not all that balanced.)
The book has a romance subplot, a sci-fi romance (romanta-sci?) but it's not that overwhelming compared to other YA books (no spicy scenes, which I always skip). Two men are attracted to Gwen. One is Aeson, the domineering Atlantean prince, and the brooding Logan (who is working as a spy for the Earth government, albeit in high school; at least I hope he was closer to Gwen's age than being someone from the 21 Jump Street program).
Luckily, Gwen has a special talent: her singing voice can manipulate the Atlantean technology, which is a feature only of the nobles. The prince is forced to train her in secret.
Anyway, what about the tournaments? There are two.
The first, the Semi-Finals, is a race through a booby-trapped LA, which is divided into safe and danger zones, except the competitors can't tell easily which is which.
The second tournament, the Finals, is an underground hoverboarding race through ancient Atlantean tunnels that conveniently have stayed undiscovered and functional for the millennia that the Atlanteans have been away from Earth. The competitors have to race to get through a series of floodgates. Nazarian doesn't shy away from the death count and bodies racking up in the tournaments, but it does feel that Gwen and her close friends have special protection.
Gwen's competitive style is a bit like the protagonist from Squid Game, in that she bumbles her way through events, being nice to others, gathering allies, and using her special talent. And while everything was over the top, it's pulp sci-fi YA action, and quite fun.
The book continues into a quartet, of which I think the first and third are the strongest. There are more discoveries about the Atlantean civilisation and what's really going on in the universe. Recommended if you enjoyed things like The Hunger Games.