onceuponanisabel's Reviews (1.48k)

This was an insane, thrilling read, and I have trouble describing how I felt about it. The prose is gorgeous and the anger is palpable and I was reading this in my bedroom at ~2am and I was actually getting kind of freaked out by the combination of this book and the dark. I loved the idea of the story: a girl who is raped gets her revenge on the boys who attacked her.

But the execution was a little off for me. This is one of those books where every character is incredibly smart but also subtle, which means that every conversation has about three layers and everybody has these very complicated plans for themselves and everyone else around them. While this makes for a fun read most of the time, it's also not even a little bit close to how people (and especially high school students) are.

The best part of this book was the epilogue for The Hating Game that was in the back of it.

I felt that this book was a really good starting place for White people.

There were a lot of topics I'd seen discussed in the fragmented form common on social media that were summarized and explained here in a way that I found helpful. If you haven't even been exposed to the concepts before at all, I could see this book being really transformative (I certainly have friends and family who I think would really benefit from reading this book). It is by no means a conclusive study on race, and I would always recommend it in conjunction with other books on race by Black authors.

There were certainly things I thought were phrased oddly or uncomfortably for me and, similarly, things I've seen pointed out by Black reviewers as being uncomfortable for them, and while those notes matter, certainly, I think that the purpose and most of the content of this book were well done and, again, helpful for White people. This video is the one that lead me to read the book after some of those aforementioned comments, and after reading, I agree wholeheartedly with her defense of the book.

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.