Series: Partials Sequence, #1
Publisher:  Balzer + Bray
Publish Date: February 28th, 2012
Source: Purchased
Goodreads

Rating: 4/5 – The pacing was a little up and down but overall this was a great scifi read!

About the book: 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.

Dan Wells, acclaimed author of I Am Not a Serial Killer, takes readers on a pulsepounding journey into a world where the very concept of what it means to be human is in question—one where our humanity is both our greatest liability and our only hope for survival. -Goodreads

Thoughts: Partials was a bit of an unsteady read… I’m still not even sure if the rating I gave it was the right one. Don’t get me wrong, it was a really good read, and I’m glad I picked this book up, it was just somewhat inconsistant. I remember reading the first page and tweeting that I was already sure I was going to love the book. Then I read a few more chapters and promptly lost interest for a few weeks. Once I muddled through the first half of the book, things started to pick up again and once I reached the home stretch, there was no turning back–I had to read until the end!

The dystopian world that Dan Wells created for this book was interesting, but not all that original. People make robots – robots rebel – war devestates life as we know it. There were some areas that can definitely be further developed for the rest of the series, which I think will go a long way toward making this world a memorable one. I did really enjoy the political side of the story and getting a bit of insider information into how the government functions, which is something you don’t see much of despite the slew of dystopian sci-fi options out there. The additional complication of the human’s war with the Partials having left the humans unable to bare children made for an interesting addition to the story, though I never quite felt the urgencry of ‘oh crap, we’re going to die out if we don’t get this sorted’.

I’ll probably be reading book two in this series by the end of the summer as I really am curious to see what happens next to Kira and her friends.

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