Published: February 28th 2012 by Balzer + Bray
The human race is all but extinct after a war with Partials—engineered organic beings identical to humans—has decimated the population. Reduced to 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 threaten to launch what’s left of humanity into 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 discover 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.
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My Review
It is the year of 2076. Sixteen-year-old Kira Walker works gathering data from dead human babies in order to help researchers find a cure for the deadly virus RM that killed most of the human race during the Break.
The Senate controls everything and everyone and has approved the Hope Act, which makes it obligatory for every fertile female to start breeding from the age of eighteen. They hope that the more babies are born, the bigger the chances one of them will survive longer than three days, becoming somehow immune to the RM.
When there is talk about the Senate wanting to drop the pregnancy age to sixteen, the Voice of People (a group of terrorists that disagree with the breach of human rights that is the Hope Act and all the intense control the Senate inflicts on people) start to attack the perimeter of the city, burning things and killing innocents
But even an even worse threat than the Voice are the Partials. Machines with human DNA built to be stronger and faster, made to protect the humans and fight for them during war times... until they turned against their makers and released the RM virus on all mankind.
Kira is tired of seeing babies die and mothers suffer from their yearly losses. So she decides to look for a cure herself. There are great amounts of data on how the virus works in the infants it infects, but not much in how the survivors became immune to it. After a lot of researching, she comes to the conclusion that the ones who created the virus should have the cure in their blood. Kira gathers all her most trustworthy friends and asks them for help with capturing a Partial for study. After a lot of debate and hesitation, they have it all planned out, but the Partials are so much more powerful than they could have imagined, and only with much luck do they get one as a prisoner... just so the soldiers of the Senate can have him killed. But the Partial is saved by the bell. The senators decide they want to 'interview'
Kira intervenes and is allowed to study him for five days, on the agreement that afterwards the specimen is to be exterminated. The Partial, Samm, turns out to be brighter, more complex and more human than she was led to believe. He may also carry the secret to cure the virus. A virus he insists his kind did not create. Samm starts to make Kira doubt everything she's ever been taught. He also needs her help. Their only hope, for either of them, is to work together.
Sometimes your enemies aren't as bad as you were led to believe... and your heroes aren't nearly as good as they claim to be.
Partials was just pure action, packed with a whole lot of tension, drama and polemic issues. Teenagers being forced to breed like cattle for the survival of the species, a government controlling every single breath you take, hiding and distorting every piece of information to keep you under their thumbs, machines that are also part human...
You won't regret it. I bet my firstborn on it. Well....maybe. LOL. Seriously, you'll love it. When I first saw that cover, I just knew I had to read it. The synopsis almost blew my head off, it sounded so good. I'm glad it delivered everything it promised and more!! I devoured the whole thing in one afternoon, in one sitting. I just wish I had the next volume in my hands already. Oh, the waiting!!! Dan Wells, will you hurry up, pretty please? *-* (BTW, a love triangle with Samm really wouldn't hurt, now, would it? ;))
If you like creative, fast-paced Young Adult books with science fiction,post Apocalyptic and dystopian themes, GO FOR IT. If you don't, just read it, anyway! Or you'll be missing out on a really awesome new series. ;P
