Living with other mechs since her wealthy parents transplanted her brain into a mechanical body to prevent her from dying in a horrible accident, Lia becomes a pawn in a religious leader’s movement to outlaw mech technology and eradicate machines such as Lia.
Rating: ★★★☆☆ – liked it
Genre: young adult fiction, ya science fiction, ya dystopia
Pros: well written, allegorical, realistic
Cons: slow paced, frustrating main character, realistic
I’m giving this book 3 stars because every problem I had getting into the book and enjoying the story was because I personally didn’t like Lia (the MC), and with the first person POV it’s all Lia all the time. If I had liked her I can tell this story would have been entirely engrossing.
One of the things I really liked about the writing is also one of the things I liked the least. That is, that the characters and their actions were so realistic.
Despite being mechs, with damage resistant bodies and memory back-ups in case they are destroyed, none of them are elite fighters or even excelling at anything much. They are completely realistic teenagers. Give them extra-strong bodies and they pull extra-dangerous stunts. Put a group of them in a house and leave them to their own devices, they screw around (in all meanings of that phrase) and bicker. There are no “maturity level of an adult, leading a teenage revolution” sort of characters. Just a group of kids with problems, facing the destructions of all their rights, trying to figure out if there’s even anything they can do about it.
The reason I almost wish it wasn’t so realistic? The constant bickering leading nowhere at all! Not to mention, hardly anything ever got done. (It was the last 1/3 of the book before they really got down to making any moves.)
This book deals a lot with prejudice. Mechs are struggling to even be seen as people. Wasserman portrays it accurately, with nuance from character to character. As opposed to a homogenous group who all feel the exact same way and hate without logic. Not everyone against the mechs is just an evil creep; some are just angry and looking for someone to be angry at, some are confused and genuinely think they are on the right side, some hide behind religion. Of course, some are just hateful people, too.
I definitely recommend this series so far. Wasserman’s writing is good enough that I enjoy it even with first person narration (something I personally hate) and a main character who sometimes tested my patience.
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