3.5/5

I wanted to enjoy this much more than I managed to. It started off very strong and the plot itself grabbed me from the get go but it was the handling of the characters that fell flat. Jack’s story worked well and interspersing her past with her present had no fault until the very end. It just seemed that instead of being the main character she was billed as, she became tossed aside to cater more for the expansion of Eliasz and Paladin. Not to mention the entire story hinging on Zacuity only for that to be a footnote in the end.

I was pleased with the relationship between Eliasz and Paladin but not with the handling of Paladin’s gender. As a trans man the fact that Paladin only began identifying as female to begin and maintain a relationship with Eliasz was irritating. There was nothing wrong with Eliasz having a relationship with Paladin under the assumption that the biobot was male due solely to engineering. Paladin seemed only to identify as female for a relationship and not because this is who she felt she was even after finding out the origins of her brain. An exploration of internalized biphobia/homophobia in the case of Eliasz would have been interesting to see but instead it seemed the fact that he is homophobic was swept under the rug as soon as his partner was female. And don’t even get me started on that throwaway bit near the end of the book when Paladin has done research on trans humans of past decades only to point out that she doesn’t actually identify any which way.

Truly I think this would have thrived more as a solo exploration of bot and human romantic relationships (minus the casual homophobia and misunderstanding of all things trans)