Book Review: Partials by Dan Wells

Pros: realistic societal tensions in a post-apocalyptic world, compelling quests, strong female protagonist

Cons: don't learn as much about the partials as you'd like, the protagonists get out of several tough situations with surprising ease

For Parents: no sex, no swearing, lots of violence, but nothing too graphic (shooting/death, off stage torture)  

It's been 11 years since the genetically engineered partials rose up against their human creators, unleashing a virus that decimated the human population.  Now, the remaining survivors live on Long Island, most in the community of East Meadow, which, due to its Hope Act of forcing all women 18 and over to give birth as often as possible, has created a resistance movement called the Voice.  Into this turmoil comes a brilliant young hospital intern, Kira.  She wants to study the one thus far unstudied aspect of the plague that still kills all human children born.  Partials.

Partials is quite an adrenaline rush.  There's a lot of action and several quests, starting, but not ending, with Kira's quest to find and capture a partial.  While I wasn't always convinced that their plans would work as well as they did, enough things went wrong that I was willing to overlook how often enough went right.

Kira herself was an interesting character.  She's borderline irritating, in that she's stubborn and 'knows' the best course of action, despite only being 16 and a 'plague baby' (ie, someone born just before the end of the modern world and too young to know what happened with the partials from personal experience).  What redeems her is her reliance on her friends and her willingness to accept a change of plans when necessary.  

What really sets this book apart is in its realistic depiction of society.  There's a wide spectrum of viewpoints, each valid given the circumstances.  East Meadows slowly becomes more and more of a dictatorship, as the Voice attacks escalate and the senate institutes more laws to keep the citizens 'safe', or, as Kira starts to believe, 'controlled'.  Even the principle characters argue over the right and wrong of the senate's decrees.  Particularly the debated decision of lowering the Hope Act to include those 16 and up (which would affect them directly).  The disconnect between the older generation and the 'plague babies', shown by the adults' disdain, was also well written.

My only complaint was that you don't learn as much about the partials as you'd like.  This book is set up for a sequel, so I'm hoping the partials - and ParaGen, the company that created them - will have more of a part to play.

I'll be waiting eagerly for the next book in this series.

Cool New YA Dystopian and Post-Apocalyptic Novels

While I was looking for the youtube videos for yesterday's post, I saw this book trailer as one of the pre-video ads.  Intrigued, I looked up the book and it sounds pretty awesome.  The book is Starters by Lissa Price, out March 13th.

HER WORLD IS CHANGED FOREVER

Callie lost her parents when the Spore Wars wiped out everyone between the ages of twenty and sixty. She and her little brother, Tyler, go on the run, living as squatters with their friend Michael and fighting off renegades who would kill them for a cookie. Callie's only hope is Prime Destinations, a disturbing place in Beverly Hills run by a mysterious figure known as the Old Man.

He hires teens to rent their bodies to Enders—seniors who want to be young again. Callie, desperate for the money that will keep her, Tyler, and Michael alive, agrees to be a donor. But the neurochip they place in Callie's head malfunctions and she wakes up in the life of her renter, living in her mansion, driving her cars, and going out with a senator's grandson. It feels almost like a fairy tale, until Callie discovers that her renter intends to do more than party—and that Prime Destinations' plans are more evil than Callie could ever have imagined. . . .

Another book I've been waiting to read that has a great book trailer is Dan Wells's Partials.

The human race is all but extinct after a war with Partials, engineered organic beings identical to humans, has decimated the population. Reduced to only tens of thousands by RM, a weaponized virus to which only a fraction of humanity is immune, the survivors in North America have huddled together on Long Island while the Partials have mysteriously retreated. The threat of the Partials is still imminent, but, worse, no baby has been born immune to RM in more than a decade. Our time is running out.

Kira, a sixteen-year-old medic-in-training, is on the front lines of this battle, seeing RM ravage the community while mandatory pregnancy laws have pushed what's left of humanity to the brink of civil war, and she's not content to stand by and watch. But as she makes a desperate decision to save the last of her race, she will find that the survival of humans and Partials alike rests in her attempts to uncover the connections between them, connections that humanity has forgotten, or perhaps never even knew were there.

Article 5, by Kristen Simmons, is sitting by my chair, waiting for me to finish my current book so I can pick it up.

New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., have been abandoned.

The Bill of Rights has been revoked, and replaced with the Moral Statutes.

There are no more police-instead, there are soldiers. There are no more fines for bad behavior-instead, there are arrests, trials, and maybe worse. People who get arrested usually don''t come back.

Seventeen-year-old Ember Miller is old enough to remember that things weren't always this way. Living with her rebellious single mother, it's hard for her to forget that people weren't always arrested for reading the wrong books or staying out after dark. It's hard to forget that life in the United States used to be different.

Ember has perfected the art of keeping a low profile. She knows how to get the things she needs, like food stamps and hand-me-down clothes, and how to pass the random home inspections by the military. Her life is as close to peaceful as circumstances allow.

That is, until her mother is arrested for noncompliance with Article 5 of the Moral Statutes. And one of the arresting officers is none other than Chase Jennings…the only boy Ember has ever loved.

And last but not least is Above by Leah Bobet.

Matthew has always lived in Safe, a community hidden far beneath the pipes and tunnels of the city Above. The residents fled to Safe years before to escape the Whitecoats and their cruel experiments, and now Matthew is responsible for both the keeping of Safe's stories and for Ariel-a golden-haired shapeshifter, and the most beautiful girl he's ever seen.

But one horrifying night, an old enemy murders Safe's founder, Atticus, and the community is taken over by an army of shadows. Only Matthew, Ariel, and a handful of friends escape Above. Now they not only have to survive in a sunlit world they barely know, but they must unravel the mystery of the shadows'' fury and Atticus's death. It's up to Matthew to find a way to remake Safe-not just for himself and his family, but for Ariel, who''s again faced with the life she fled, and who needs him more than ever before.

Too many books to read, too little time...