To be honest, I kind of feel like this series has been going downhill from the start.

I...didn't really love this book. There were parts I enjoyed, like Cricket as a character and the idea of the CityHive, and Lemon and Grimm's relationship. But there were major things that I really take issue with, so here goes.

Primarily, I take issue with the morality in this book. This whole series is about a new generation of robot who aren't beholden to any human master, and their quest to free all other robots from that enslavement. It includes a war between two mega-corporations, BioMaas (bio-engineers who seek to improve and perfect nature) and Daedalus (a tech company that produces new robots and VR software?). This is going to very spoilery, but I don't know how else to explain this.

BioMaas kidnaps Lemon in order to harvest her DNA and make clones to use as weapons. Their entire ecosystem runs on a series of clones, who are perfected to perform their tasks. Morally problematic, to be sure, but the main criticism the book has is that they aren't human, that they're too odd and too the same. That is, until the Directors of BioMaas inexplicably state that they plan on killing everyone else besides BioMaas clones for...reasons? Because they're inferior, I guess?

Similarly, Daedalus Technologies kidnaps Eve and tortures (and eventually tries to kill) her to gain access to new tech and to gain information about Lemon. They are criticized in the book for using a society of exploited workers as their labor source, but hey, at least they aren't planning on committing genocide, I guess.

Finally, we have Eve, Gabriel, and the other Lifelikes up in Babel, who plan on releasing the libertas virus in order to release all robots from their obligations to humans and also to create new Lifelikes because Gabriel wants his dead girlfriend back. Problematic that they, too, kill humans with abandon, but again, suddenly we know they're bad because Gabriel, again, inexplicably wants to kill all humans because he believes robots to be superior. (Sensing a repetition yet?)

So our main gang decides it's acceptable to LITERALLY NUKE THE SHIT out of both BioMaas and Babel (remember how it's the bad guys who want to commit genocide? what then, pray tell, is this that our "heroes" have chosen to do) and that they're allying themselves with... the company that expoits huge numbers of people for labor and *checks notes* the religious zealots who lynch people they don't like. Cool cool cool cool cool.

Beyond this utter nonsense, we also have characters flipping sides with abandon for very little reason at the drop of a hat, and everyone is just okay with that? (I'm talking here about both Eve and Preacher, who are both forgiven repeatedly for killing A Bunch of people). I honestly feel like Kristoff had a decent enough start to this series, but not enough of a clear vision of where it was going to execute it well. A lot of the plot points feel like they come out of nowhere and I struggled to find much reliability in any of the characters for precisely that reason. This book strongly lacked the "why". Why were the characters acting the way they were? I was never quite sure.

If you're looking for good YA Sci-Fi, there's loads more out there (you don't even have to leave Kristoff's works -- the Illuminae Files are truly excellent). Head somewhere else instead of picking this trilogy up.

ARC provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.