This book is such a strange beast. I’ve actually been moving it down my TBR because every time it hits the top, I’m just not in the mood or was hesitant because of the science aspects of the book. But it handled all of that really well, actually. I mean, I’m not scientist but this feels like it’s pretty well researched.

Putting labels on this is pretty difficult because of that. It’s definitely YA; it can feel too tropey sometimes. But I was finally in the mood for something like that, and it executes that aspect of the genre really well. The voice is personable and intelligent; it has excellent flow, definitely a page turner. It’s action packed, has a slow burn romance (the most indifferent things about the book for me, personally), and is post apocalyptic due to a virus.

On the tin, so to speak, it’s fairly generic: A young woman loses her father, a leading expert in virology, to a corporation that exfiltrates him to their lab in order to solve a pandemic; leaving her alone to make her own way through the rapidly declining civilization. 2 years later a solider finds her and tells her the father is dead, but hope for humanity lies in her own gene hacked enchantments. They just need to follow the clues to figure out how to decrypt it and deal with all the challenges beyond that.

I think someone recommended this to me when I was reading biopunk/cyberpunk stuff, because this book is great with those aspects. It’s absolutely the highlight of the text for me. There’s a neat intersection between here bio enhancements and integrated technologies. It’s not too cerebral, but the author definitely seems to know her stuff. She explains it just well enough that you get that she knows what she’s talking about (AFAIK) and then moves on.

It also works as a vector for larger themes we see today. Corporations attempting to monopolize the gene market and this research itself opening the door for ethical questions. While those questions specifically are not new, they aren’t antiquated. More recent decisions about this scientific research is at play, and the overall understanding geneticists have is far more updated than we have seen in the genre. For instance, it does not hinge on cloning (thank god).

The virus itself is also pretty unique. It’s still a zombie trope, but has an interesting spin. Once infected they go through stages, the last one being to actually explode—sending particulates and human debris into the air as a contagion. But if people actually consume people at an earlier stage of the virus they are immune, and there is a stage where the pheromones released make people want to do so.

It certainly feels like a man made, horrific, sick scientist sort of thing. It’s also handled in a way that really effectively annunciates the suspense and the themes of the book without, somehow, not being too melodramatic.

And melodramatic it is. But… in the exact right dosage? I don’t know how to explain it other than just “fun”? It’s not so melodramatic that you bail, it’s just enough that it fits the genre conventions and is dramatic. I think if the prose and craft weren’t there this could easily have turned into something that was unlikable. There’s plenty of plot twists and will-they-won’t-they and then cool action sequences that dovetail into talking about her cool, inbuilt technologies and other world building I found to be just as interesting.

It’s a story you need to be in the mood for, I think. But provided a perfect mesh of popcorn fiction, spec fiction, melodrama, and action. Truly a chimera of YA fiction, but I’m here for it, honestly.