The Mad Scientist's Daughter

by Cassandra Rose Clarke

Nominated for the Phillip K. Dick Award, a science fiction fairy tale set in a collapsing future America about a girl and the android she falls in love with.

When Cat Novak was a young girl, her father brought Finn, an experimental android, to their isolated home. A billion-dollar construct, Finn looks and acts human, but he has no desire to be one. He was programmed to assist his owners, and performs his duties to perfection.

His primary task now is to tutor Cat. Finn stays with her, becoming her constant companion and friend as she grows into adulthood. But when the government grants rights to the ever-increasing robot population, Finn struggles to find his place in the world. As their relationship goes further than anyone intended, they have to face the threat of being separated forever.

Genres: Science Fiction, Romance, Young Adult, Fantasy, Fiction, Dystopia, Robots

336 pages, Hardcover

First published January 28, 2013

About the author

Cassandra Rose Clarke is a speculative fiction writer living amongst the beige stucco and overgrown pecan trees of Houston, Texas. She graduated in 2006 from The University of St. Thomas with a bachelor’s degree in English, and in 2008 she completed her master’s degree in creative writing at The University of Texas at Austin. Both of these degrees have served her surprisingly well.

During the summer of 2010, she attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle, where she enjoyed sixty-degree summer days. Having been born and raised in Texas, this was something of a big deal. She was also a recipient of the 2010 Susan C. Petrey Clarion Scholarship Fund.

Reviews

[Navessa · Rating 5 out of 5]

THIS BOOK MADE ME CRY. CORRECTION, THIS BOOK MADE ME SOB. BOTH TIMES I READ IT.

For those of you who know me well, you know what kind of declaration that is. For those of you who don’t, allow me elaborate. I have malfunctioning tear ducts. I cry, on average, about once every six years. This book broke me, absolutely shattered me in a way that I’m not entirely comfortable with.

The thing is, there wasn’t any one scene that did me in either. The entire book left me with a raw, achy feeling, like I was coming down with the flu. My skin was too sensitive, my head buzzed, my throat felt constricted. Then, about 4/5 of the way through, tears started to pour down my face. And I was helpless to stop them.

I’m at a loss for how to do this book justice, so please bear with me while I try.

This is the story of every person that has ever caved to society.

I hate to say it, but that’s most of us. Did you have a crush on the "wrong guy" in high school but didn’t go after him because you were worried about what other people would say? Did you go to college because your parents pushed you to? Did you choose your major based on which degree would get you a safe, dependable job? Did you ever make a choice about anything because you thought it was what you should do? I'm sure the answer to this final question is 'yes'. Lord knows it is for me.

This is also the story of every person that has ever been unhappy or unsatisfied.

This is about the introspective one that doesn’t relate well to the rest of society. The one that pulled herself so far into her own mind that other people’s words stopped reaching her. The recluse, the self-saboteur, the coward, the ice-queen.

The only way I can think to describe our MC, Cat, is to say that reading this book, being in her mind, felt like being chained to her as she stood by a bank of windows while a hurricane raged outside.

There she was, watching the rain pelt the glass in front of her as she wondered how it would feel on her skin. Would it be cold? Would it hurt?

When the trees began to whip back and forth I knew that she should seek shelter in the basement, that it was only a matter of time before a branch hit the glass or the roof caved in. Some part of her must have recognized this danger too, but instead of fleeing she remained where she was, gazing out into the fury with a strange look of longing on her face.

And so I too remained, trapped beside her as she listened to the muffled howls of the wind, safe and warm within her house as an echoing cry built in the back of her throat.

I wanted to warn her, scream at her to get away, protect her in some way, because deep down, I recognized part of myself within her, and I wanted to save her from what I thought was coming.

But when the glass finally shattered and the storm bore down on us, did I urge her to run? No. I stood there beside her as the wind lashed our hair and the rain stung our faces because suddenly I realized that this is what she’d been waiting for all along.

And that she was finally free.

This book has affected me in a way that no other has this year. This book will remain with me in a way that no other will this year. I urge you to read it.

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[Khanh, first of her name, mother of bunnies · Rating 4 out of 5]

"It's impossible to love something you know's made out of wire and metal."
"You talk about him like he's a computer."
"He is a computer," said Dr Condon. "That's what I'm trying to tell you."
"It's not flesh and blood," she said. "It's not normal."

Mind: blown. Preconceptions: dashed to pieces. I cannot say in all honesty that this has converted me to the genre, but my god, what a fabulous read. What a fantastic work of literature. This is going to be such a difficult review to write because my emotions are all over the place. Books rarely make me emotional. I'm not a crier. A friend promised me tears. Thus, I reached for this book. I wanted something that would make me cry.

I didn't cry. But that is not to say that this book did not make an emotional impact upon me. It did, tremendously. I was angry, I was upset, I was infuriated. I felt resentment. I felt hopelessness. I felt an immense sense of doom. I was heartbroken.

No, I didn't cry, but this book left me with an uncomfortable lump in my throat, a painful prickling of tears in my eyes, and a terribly unattractive red nose by the time I finished. And you know what? I'll gladly wear my unseemly red nose as a point of pride, because of how much I loved this book. I will gladly go through my day sniffling like a fool. This is the best book I have read in a long time, in terms of pure artistry, in terms of the raw power of emotional depth it weaves in its characters. I have rarely encountered a book that felt more real.

The writing is spare, simple, evocative, and absolutely impeccable for the tone of this book. If the writing in this book were a man, I would take him to my bedroom (and perhaps the basement afterwards), tie him down with a silk rope, and make violent love to him. The writing is flawless.

This book should be read as a character study, a love story, a tale of human nature and growth. I am not a fan of slow books, I prefer the fantastic, the excitement of livelier genre. This is a change of pace for me, and this is a risk I am so glad I took. I'm not an adventurous reader. I stay away from subjects I don't like, I stay away from things I do not care for. I love technology, I love computers, but robots, androids, mechanical beings do not interest me. I've stayed away from many a beloved series (Cinder, for example), for that reason. I don't like androids.

You know what? Screw the android factor, screw the technology. This book's strength lies beyond that. This book should not be read as science fiction, because the android man within it is far more human, far more real, far more loveable than most of the literary men I have ever known. You know that one friend you take for granted, the one friend who has always been there for you? The one who stays up at 3 AM with you, listening patiently while you are sobbing away your sorrows? The one friend who becomes such a constant in your life that you don't realize their significance until they're gone? This is an ode to that friend, an ode to the good guy, a love song to all who have been there, done that, and never appreciated for the treasure that they are.

Summary: It is America, some time in the future. There has been an event known as the Disaster. Much of the American Midwest is barren. Robots and androids is no longer the stuff of science fiction, but a fixture in everyday life. They have helped to rebuilt the cities after they have been devastated. The setting is rather vague, but the setting is unimportant, much like the backdrops in a play. The people, and one android in particular, are the stars of this book.

Caterina Novak was five years old when she first met Finn. A tall, pale young man. He looks real, but there's something not quite right about him. Something not quite human. She decides that he is a ghost. She tries to get rid of him, bringing him to a cemetary, because she has heard that ghosts will return to their resting place.

Finn doesn't disappear like a recalcitrant spirit. He stays on. He becomes her tutor. Finn becomes her friend, and remains her friend through her carefree childhood, through her bitter adolescent years. He listens to her, he is a silent ally in the face of her brilliant father's loving neglectfulness, in the face of her brilliant mother's disappointment in her unacademic daughter. He is always there for her, silently supportive through it all.

Androids do not have emotions. Androids do not feel. Androids are not people. Cat's father, Daniel Novak, becomes known among the town as "the mad scientist" for his work with androids. A preacher in town rallies against his work.

"A person? No, it's just a machine made to look like a person...So they can steal jobs from us easier. It plain ain't right. That's what my preacher says." His face dropped down. He looked Cat straight on. Her entire body shook. "I mean, your dad made it, right? A human being? Way I see it, any robot that close to a person is an abomination."

To many people, androids are wicked, evil, an abomination against God. Cat defends Finn through it all.

They are friends, they are best friends, until one day when their friendship feels like something more.

He was close to her. Cat felt light-headed, and she knew it had nothing to with her inability to understand math. She was on the precipice of something. It coiled inside her like a snake and made her fidgety and distracted.

Years pass. A string of boyfriends have come and gone. Oscar. Michael. Richard.

Life passes by, with its devastations and its joys, compended with an impending sense of claustrophobia as you feel the walls closing in.

What is love, if you can't have it, if you avoid it? What is love to one who cannot feel it? Cat and Finn's lives are separated, joined, but their fates are intertwined. Everything will come crashing down in a crescendo

Cat cried harder. She leaned her head against Finn's chest. Water lapped at their bodies. His hands were in her hair. They did not kiss; they did not speak.
Everything had unraveled.

The Characters: There is not one single character who was not flawless in this book. I don't mean flawless as in likeable, because they are certainly not all likeable. They are sometimes despicable, they are oftentimes cruel, they inspire pity, hate. They are not flawless, but I loved them all, because they all feel so perfectly human. Humans are not perfect. Humans are flawed, destructible. You do not raise a human to a pedestal, because they will inevitably fall.

There are many who will hate Cat. I understand. So do I, at times. I am resentful of her. She starts off as a spoiled little rich girl. She is an only child, left to roam the woods alone with Finn, with little supervision. She is rebellious, hatteful towards her mother, who wants a brilliant child, not one who is inclined towards artistry. Cat is the kind of girl that I hate, someone who seemingly has everything handed to her on a platter. She is beautiful, she attracts the kind of guy a lot of girls would kill to have, with not much effort other than her own looks and careless personality. Cat is the kind of girl of whom I would whisper behind her back "What is he doing with HER?" Admit it, we've all been there.

Cat is selfish, ever so selfish. She goes through life as a cloud, not really caring about anything along the way. She faces problems with the skill of an ostrich: if I stick my head in the sand for long enough, I can pretend that the problem doesn't exist. She is immature, she remains this way, until her life starts to disintegrate.

I loved it when Cat broke. I was devastated with her when her life shattered, however I was indifferent to her before, however I belittled her before.

The world was utterly still, and she was aware of the movement of the inside of her body: the expansion of her lungs and the fluttery pumps of her heart, pushing blood out into her extremities. Her heart, broken a million times over.

The thing is, Cat grows up. We see Cat through so much of her life that it feels like observing someone you know grow up. Cat matures. She learns. She realizes her selfishness. She cries for her own cruelty. She recognizes her mistakes. She accepts them.

Cat took a deep breath. She wiped her muddy tears away. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry I didn't realize."
I'm selfish, she thought, and then she thought it over and over. I'm selfish. I'm selfish.

The Romance: Love is an integral part of this novel, and it should be. The love of a mother for her child. The love of a mad scientist, who is not so much a mad scientist as much as he is a bewildered father. The love of friends. Most vitally, the love of a woman who has to grow up before she realizes she is capable of it. The love of an android who could not, who should not be able to feel such a thing as emotions.

"Finn, can you fall in love?" she asked.
Finn froze. On the record, one song faded out and another began. Laughter from the kitchen.
"Oh, Finn," said Cat. "No. No… I meant." She stopped, bit her lower lip. "Please don't think–"
"Think what? It's a reasonable question." He paused. Cat's heart pounded. Her head ached, the start of a hangover. "No, I don't believe I can. Love is far too ill-defined a concept to work within my current parameters. It's too...abstract."

Can androids fall in love? The answer is yes, yes, they can.

"Desire is simple," he said. "Desire is something even a machine can understand." There was a stillness in the air that mirrored the stillness of his body. "But when I desired you I began to love you. You were the first being I ever loved. I didn't know it, of course. I had no idea what it meant, no idea what I was feeling. Love was never something I was supposed to experience." He laughed against her skin. "Later, I was finally able to understand the complexities of love. Even if I didn't want to. At first."

[Maja (The Nocturnal Library) · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Mad Scientist’s Daughter takes place over the course of many years. At the beginning, Cat, the daughter of two accomplished scientist, is only eight years old. Her father brings home a strange man, Finn, to live with them and be Cat’s tutor. At first, Cat doesn’t understand what this man is, his reactions and behavior unlike anything she’d ever seen before. As she grows up, what he is no longer matters as Finn becomes her anchor, that one immutable thing that holds together her very chaotic, directionless life.

Cat spends most of the book in utter denial, running from her feelings toward Finn and convincing herself that, as an android, he can’t possibly feel the same. We see her in different stages of her life and thus get to meet many sides of her. She struggles for most of her life, doing everything she deems normal and acceptable, all the while punishing herself for loving something unnatural, an abomination. While running from herself and from Finn, Cat makes a series of selfish choices and ends up hurting the only person who’s ever shown her a modicum of respect.

As a character, Cat is a hive of conflicting emotions, ranging from guilt and self-disgust to love and acceptance. Try as she might, she can’t quite hide her emotions from the world, especially when someone threatens or insults Finn. Her fierce protectiveness and the readiness with which she jumps to his defense give her away each and every time.

Beneath everything Cat does is a deep self-hatred and desperate need for approval. At its very core, The Mad Scientist’s Daughter is a romance, but a desperate, torturous one that can be very hard to read about.

Finn isn’t much of a hero, but not through any fault of his own. Not quite an android and not quite a man, one of a kind in every way, he is everybody’s victim, even those who love him the most. His emotional awakening comes at a very high price because it leads him to realize that everyone who was ever supposed to care for him and protect him either abandoned him or used him in the worst possible way.

It’s clear by now that Cat is no heroine either. Quite the contrary, I’m afraid. One bad choice after another and one train wreck of a marriage do not a heroine make. Even when she supposedly turned a new leaf, some of her choices deeply troubled me and I’m surprised Clarke never addressed them.

Overall, The Mad Scientist’s Daughter is by no means a light-hearted, fun book, and it’s certainly not young adult. Had I known how complicated and angst-filled it was, I doubt I would have picked it up, but now I’m glad I did.

[Alienor ✘ French Frowner ✘ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slow and atmospheric, this book is nostalgia at its finest - the one we feel while looking at our past and our forgotten dreams - except Cat's nostalgia wraps every part of her life : past, present, future. Readers have been saying that she's selfish and thoughtless, going through life without never thinking about anyone else than herself, and yes, it's true. I should hate her for it, and yet, I can't. I can't because the way she's portrayed let me see how much her life seems... pointless to her.

"She felt like a seashell, pretty enough but empty and easily broken."

When the only path leading to happiness is unthinkable, how to find the strength to care?

A better person might have found it. Cat is not that likeable person, and that fact itself added so much layers to the story. Who wants to read about a perfect character whose choices are always wise? Definitely not me. She uses people's weaknesses to make her life easier, she lies, cheats and doesn't think about the consequences of her actions. She's reckless, and yet, the sense of doom constantly hovering over her head touched me and let me unable to hate her.

"Something inside of her - her calcified heart, her numbness - had cracked in two, and she was trembling and she thought, Here, this, this is what it feels like to feel something."

Her life is filled with the tragedy of caving in. To the world. To other's expectations. And while she loses herself along the way, Finn is the only one who can pick up the pieces of her shattered life. At what cost, though?

What makes you human? Is it your ability to love, to hate? Is it your consciousness?

Finn's character brings all these questions to life - can I just say? He is a fantastic male-lead in my opinion and I'm not even ashamed to say that I fell a little more in love with him each time he made an apparition. Yes, he is an android. He is one of a kind and is crushed by the loneliness of it. His hesitations, his sensibility (yes, I realize how paradoxical it appears) resonated in my heart and made me feel so, so much. I adored him.

But above all that, this book speaks to me because of its undercurrent of pessimism. I know, it seems awful, but hear me out, okay? The way people are portrayed here, the way they act, the way they judge is so realistic unfortunately. Everybody wants to live in a world where differences are not an issue and where everyone respects everyone. If you know this world please tell me where it is, because it's not the world I'm living in.

No. I'm living in a world where your sexual life, your genre, your job, your appearance, your origin are under the judgment of others, and if I don't live my life to fulfill these endless expectations, I can't deny that it is here. However, every day as a teacher I feel hope, and in the end, with Cat's growth, that's also what this book gave to me. Hope. It might seem cheesy, but to me there's nothing more important, even more because my knee-jerks reactions are those of a pessimist.

The Mad Scientist's Daughter caused such a visceral reaction in me - slowly building from the start, never wavering - that it will keep a special place in my heart. For that, I'm grateful.

For more of my reviews, please visit:

[Keertana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Looking back, I think I can acknowledge that The Mad Scientist's Daughter is more of a tragic love story than anything else. Although it's been marketed as sci-fi, focusing on robots and a dystopian future that seems eerily similar to something our own children may experience, at the core, it is all romance and not much else. Let me clarify - all dramatic and angst-ridden romance. Unfortunately, I didn't even feel much for this main romance since I was too preoccupied coming up with ways to murder the main character, Cat. I feel like an anomaly, simply because everyone seems to have at least liked this story, if not loved it, but I was literally crying tears of happiness as I neared the end. I suppose, though, that at the end of the day, some books aren't for everyone and this one just wasn't for me.

I will say, however, that Clarke has some of the worst synopsis writers ever. Seriously, the synopsis for The Assassin's Curse gave away the entire plot and the synopsis for this one gives away too little. Ultimately, however, the novel is about, as its title suggests, Cat, the daughter of famed scientist Daniel Novak. When Dr. Novak brings Finn, a robot who looks and seems human in every way, to their home when Cat is only five, her entire life is changed. At first, their relationship is one of tender friendship. Cat is tutored by Finn, but as she grows, so do her feelings for him. Nevertheless, the fact remains that Finn isn't human, he's only a robot, so he can't possibly feel anything for her too...can he?

I found the premises of this novel to be fascinating and was quickly drawn into the story of Cat as her life unfolds, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. Yet, as I finished the first part of this novel, for it is split into three parts, I couldn't help but lose my former enthusiasm for the story. For one, the novel just drags. It covers nearly half of the total lifespan that Cat lives and as such, it is a long book, one with lots of extraneous details and under-developed secondary characters that it is impossible to feel much for because of their fleeting presence, giving way to more than a little skipping.

More important, however, Cat is an unlikable character like no other; unlikable to the point where she's quite literally a bad person, not someone who is good and has their flaws. As Cat grows and continues to deny her feelings for Finn, treating him as a robot while seeing him as a man, she uses him in more ways than one; uses him as an object, never bothering to care for his feelings and exploiting him for her own gain, despite her care for him. Later, in an effort to escape her attachment to him, she uses other men in her life, for instance her rich husband whose love she never returns. It's all just one disaster after another; death followed by a loveless marriage followed by more sorrow.

If all that desolation wasn't enough to turn me away, I never felt as if Cat was truly redeemed by the end - I still hated her with a passion. Now, books, as John Green would say, are not in the business of creating likable characters, which I totally understand, but I do believe that they are in the business of creating bonds with a reader and that was sadly missing. Of all the characters in this tale, the only one I came to feel for was Finn; sweet, kind Finn who seemed to be utterly manipulated by everyone in his life, from Cat's kind father to Cat, who loved him, herself. Furthermore, more than a lack of emotion or feeling when it came to this book, there were so many aspects of Cat's life that we found out about, but that played no larger role overall; I guess that the plot outline was generally very sloppy for this, introducing elements that were completely unnecessary and leaving me detached even from the story itself.

Yet, even more than the characters and my dislike of the romance, this book sorely disappointed me with all its wasted potential. At times, the novel would veer towards political debates on the humanity of these robots, whether or not they should have been granted rights, etc., but none of this was further explored. Furthermore, Cat never undergoes any doubt or lingering qualms before entering into a relationship - or whatever you want to call it - with Finn. Of course, she realizes that it isn't normal or even right to be in love with a computer, but she doesn't seem to care or worry. In fact, the only character who ever calls out Cat on her relationship with Finn is her mother, who is conveniently killed off in the first third of the novel.

While The Mad Scientist's Daughter was not a book for me, I'm sure it will move many other readers. I'm not one for angsty romances that remind me of the majority of adult romances that I so painstakingly avoid and especially not with hints of politics and sci-fi thrown in thrown in for the sake of it; I'm especially not one to condone heroines who use men in a twisted love triangle fashion, giving the type of love that is seen as practically obsessive for they are a mere shell of themselves without their loved one. I cannot deny that Clarke is a phenomenal writer and her versatility has definitely shown through in her quick - and successful - venture into adult novels. Still, I think I'll just stick with her YA books - God knows I can't wait for The Pirate's Wish to release!

You can read this review and more on my blog, Ivy Book Bindings.

[Ash Wednesday · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 STARS

I've been dreading this… moment, my entire day. I finished this book a good 9 hours ago. Went to work. Stared at the wall while having too much coffee. Fought with my boyfriend. Had a bit more coffee. Did a bit of mole surgery (the patient was okay despite the caffeine). Ate a shitload of carbs with coffee on the side with my cousins.

I did all that while thinking of this book.

And dreading the moment, this moment, when I have to keep the voices in my head quiet and forge my thoughts into something coherent.

Because it's always a bitch to write about the good ones.

I've only ever read one robot book (it sucked). It's not a particularly enticing subject matter for me, I really wasn't a fan of Pinocchio, stories like these tend to take that predictable route and this has Disney written all over it. I've seen AI, thanks, not feeling the need to revisit Haley Joel Osment.

This book was such a pleasantly humbling experience.

The Mad Scientist's Daughter is Caterina Novak, who at the start of the book is five years old, seeing her father come home with a ghost named Finn. Or what she supposed is a ghost but is actually an android (something that she learned early on, thankfully) who has been brought to live with them as her father's lab assistant. Finn is different from his contemporaries, in a time when robots are discriminated as mere appliances, he's astoundingly human-like in appearance and his mannerisms. He's one of a kind, but still unmistakably a robot. Cat grows up with Finn, initially as her tutor, her friend and eventually, her lover. The book pretty much covers her at various stages in her life from being a sheltered little girl to the kind of woman she eventually became.

Which of course translates to this book being quite a long one. But still ended up feeling this side of short for me. The fact that this was told as a third person account of Cat's perspective gave the story a fairytale-like feel and Cassandra Rose Clarke's cold, almost matter-of-fact prose was perfect for the sci-fi/dystopian setting. While at the same time, an effective contralto to this unrelentingly sad, emotional story set in the not-so-distant future. There's no relief from the deep ache in your heart, no rest from the rattling in your bones. And just when you think the story is starting to turn the intensity down a notch, you realize it's only to stir questions in your mind that will still be bereft of answers in the end.

Yet I couldn't stop reading because she is human right? This author? Surely some mercy is coming for these characters Finn and you want to know how, where and when.

I'm fairly certain, Cat isn't the kind of character the reader was meant to tether their emotions to. Mostly because she represents the kind of humanity that we have in all of us that we don't like to examine too closely. The one that's the consummate consumer, the default user, that comes out in zombie apocalypse scenarios and survival games set in isolated islands. It was simultaneously uncomfortable and fascinating to remember how we, as a race, perceive ourselves relative to the bottom-dwellers of the food chain, our needs before them. How selfish we can really be even without intending to. That was exactly what Cat represented. She wasn't a monster, she's very human. She means well, it's just that she means well first for herself than anyone or anything else.

"Was that acceptable?" Finn asked.
"Yes," said Cat, the word drawn out of her as though on a tapestry needle. Something inside of her - her calcified heart, her numbness - had cracked in two, and she was trembling and she thought, Here, this, this is what it feels like to feel something.

There's a very clear depiction of how both Cat and Finn evolved in two opposite directions. Where one becomes progressively mechanical: an empty shell, a ghost; while the other gradually gains sentience, becomes more human in so many ways. And the point where they meet in the middle was both beautiful and painful. I love how her father, the mad scientist, served as an excellent plot tool in driving the story into motion, especially in the latter half of this book. His moments with Cat brought a different dimension in the story that made this one of the most dynamic stories I've read in a while.

The world building was pretty solid, I rather liked how the future here was presented. It never felt alienating or too technical and I rather liked the grain of relatability that was ever present. These details were introduced seamlessly in the story without resorting to infodump or inconsistency. I'm actually reluctant to shelf this as sci-fi/dystopian with how very relatable this future felt, none of the slick inventions or highfalutin engineering wonders that always comes across cartoonish to me.

I've thought more thoughts in those 9 hours, thoughts that this book can rightfully claim made this reader think in the first place. But my mind has been over-caffeinated and my hard drive is already near-full with crap I really don't need (did you know people who are allergic to latex are 50% more likely to be allergic to bananas as well?). And I'm a bit sad that I can't recommend this to all of my friends because it is quite heavy and the sadness followed me a little throughout my day with how things ended in this one. I had very little to critique about this book but I have no urge to revisit this anytime soon… or ever again.

Because I have a feeling this is going to stick with me for a VERY long time.

Also on BookLikes.

ARC provided by Angry Robot thru Netgalley in exchange for an unbiased review.

[Karlyflower *The Vampire Ninja, Luminescent Monster & Wendigo Nerd Goddess of Canada (according to The Hulk)* · Rating 4 out of 5]

Buddy-read with one of my favourite girlies, Heather. Coming to a goodreads near you, October 2015!



Happy Spooktober, ladies and gents! For those of you who may somehow have missed that I have a love affair with Halloween, seriously, where have you been?? Anyways… I LOVE Halloween, all the things that go bump in the night. And while The Mad Scientist’s Daughter may not seem like it fits that bill, for me; it did.

Some Vampire Ninja backstory (feel free to scroll on by if you don’t care to read this part):

I grew up in a small town that never quite realised it had outgrown that status. Mind sets and behavioural patterns had not changed in many generations, although the population had grown substantially. I grew up in a highly racist town, the kind of town where people had racial slurs as nicknames. And while there was a great deal of overt racism and prejudice to be found those weren’t the most detrimental. The most problematic parts of that racism, for me, were the subtle things; the things that it’s easy to overlook or simply not see at all. The tiny moments that sneak in and prey on your weaknesses and alter your choices without you even realising it.

To say that I grew up in a predominantly Caucasian town would be an extreme understatement. It is only on looking back at these times that I realise how much my town’s mind set affected my choices. I was always a firm believer in diversity, a fact which earned me a great deal of ostracism growing up and a not so subtle nickname of ‘Spaz’. My best friend often said that I would defend a garbage can if I thought someone was picking on it. And he, probably, wasn’t wrong there. However, despite the fact that I was ALWAYS attracted to Asian men it never occurred to me that I could actually date one until I was an adult.

This is what I mean about ‘little things’. The Asians in my hometown never inter-dated. In fact, the boy I had a crush on for most of high school never dated ANYONE. And it wasn’t that he couldn’t have or that it was this talked about thing. It just didn’t happen. I was good friends with two boys (for sake of this review, I was actually friends with several); one of them was Caucasian (CN), the other was Korean (JP). I was harassed mercilessly that I should just date CN already on a daily basis. I was NEVER even asked if I “liked” JP in a romantic manner, not once. In the entire eight years I was friends with him.

These ‘little things’, the subtle moments that feel like they aren’t affecting us in any way are some of the biggest contributing factors to how we behave. And it’s not even just the fear of ostracism that motivates us, it’s not that concrete. It’s the concept of normalcy. My attraction to JP was abnormal, so it never actually had a chance to grow-up. It was never given wings. I simply ignored it.

It took a living nightmare (which I will not go into here, because it’s tonally inappropriate) to make me realise how much of a bubble I had erected around myself. To make me realise that in going along with what everyone else wanted of me I had made myself a perfect victim. If you don’t go after your own dreams, there will be someone out there with a nightmare custom made for you.

Now, I don’t mean to say that I just went out and found “an Asian guy”. That isn’t what happened at all. I just allowed myself to consider it. And that allowance was freeing for me.

Story time, mostly, over.

You may be wondering why the hell I went into all that detail up there. What does any of that nonsense have to do with anything?

The closest approximation I have to the obstacles presented in The Mad Scientist’s Daughter is racism. And it is the way in which I bonded with Cat. I bonded with her over the numbness of pretending not to feel a way because society told her it was wrong. Of repressing or ignoring feelings so frequently that they became unnatural to her. Of second guessing herself so often that she began to judge her reactions based on what those around her would do.

Of watching people disregard someone she cared about. I felt for her. It may not be the exact same, racism has been fought on a much greater front than the obstacles within this book. However, I can relate to standing next to the person I love and having other men hit on me as if he weren’t there at all; as if he were inconsequential. And in those moments sometimes I feel selfish for loving him; because why should he have to put up with that? It’s an irrational feeling, I know.

I really liked how Clarke highlighted Finn’s variances from humans. She endeared him to me by making him ‘other than human’. In the pauses over questions that we would quickly answer, even if that answer were a platitude. In the inhuman sound of his foot falls, in pointing out the whirling hum of his chest in a heart beat’s stead. However, towards the end of this story I became pissed off. I became pissed off because of the ‘Orgasm function’ and the ‘feeling program’. I am annoyed that I fell in love with all the android aspects of a character and they were changed to “humanize” Finn. That would be like if I had fallen in love with the almond shape of CQ’s eyes, the way his skin is a warm gold even in wintertime and his coarse, near-black hair and suddenly because I loved him he suddenly started looking more Caucasian. I am not impressed.

I have never endeavoured to be human, a fact Daniel had difficulty accepting at first. However, he never looked down on me for it. And he made his mistakes. But ultimately he loved me – for who I am, for what I am. He loved me for me, not some version of me that will never exist. And for that I am grateful. It is a mark of true humanity.

This book was poetically horrifying in so many ways, for me.

Let me love you, Finn ♥

One final note: I wouldn’t say that this book is a re-telling of The Island of Doctor Moreau so much as a story INSPIRED by the themes of same. The tone here is entirely different.

[❤Ninja Bunneh❤ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Years ago, I saw a movie called Bicentennial Man. It made me cry rivers. I see an echo of that movie in this book, and a new river of tears was forged today.
Usually when I don't like the main character in a book, the whole thing goes to shit. I'm very judgmental with my books. I'm also very unforgiving. The Mad Scientist's Daughter allowed me to despise the main, Cat, but fall in love with the story and the other characters.
We are told the tale of Cat and Finn, which spans many years. Cat, who is a little girl when she first meets Finn. And, Finn, who is an android her father brought to live with them.
Cat is selfish. So very selfish. I hate people who use others. She is the epitome of all I hate. She uses people to satisfy her own needs and wants. She is an empty void. Not thinking who she hurts to alleviate her own emotions. She uses Finn as she sees fit. Hurts him, but never looks to see the damage she does. She's blind.
Finn, not a human. Never claiming to be. Finn, who I was able to see as more human than Cat. Finn, who against all things thought possible, comes to love a woman who doesn't deserve him at all.
It's so funny because any tears I cried were over Finn or Cat's father. Cat does improve over the years in the story. I never felt like giving her redemption. As I said before, I'm very unforgiving.

I don't handle angst very well. This book is way up there in the angst department. It's probably why my review is quite short and a tad incoherent. I still feel a heavy sadness. But, ironically, I think that's also what makes a story wonderful. If it can make you feel emotions, even if you feel like your heart was torn to shreds, that makes it fabulous.

4 Nutella chocolate chip cookie stars

Thank you to Angry Robot, NetGalley, and Ms. Clarke, for the arc. No cookies were given to me in exchange for an honest review.

*Buddy read with Ange, Soumi, Sarah and Litchick.*

[CS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bullet Review:

I am totally in love with this book, probably the first time since "Ready Player One". And if you know me, you will realize how BIG that is.

5 thousand stars. And where the hell is my Finn??!?

Full Review:

Caterina Novak is the daughter of Daniel Novak, a "mad scientist" who specializes in cybernetics. As a younger girl, Daniel brings home Finn, an android, to tutor his daughter. Through the years, Cat grows to see Finn as less a machine and more of a man. But does Finn love her back? Can he love her? Should she even bother?

Let's just cut to the chase: I love this book. I love this book to the depths of my soul. I sped through half of the book and then didn't want to finish, it was so good.

This book really doesn't seem like the type of book that I would love. I mean, I love science fiction, and I love romance, but this book isn't really either. It's post-apocalyptic-science-fiction-romance-character-study-drama. Like Diana Gabaldon's "Outlander" series, it defies categorizing. Like Gabaldon's series, it isn't just a romantic story, it isn't just about the science-gizmos, it's not just about a terrible thing that happened in the past that made Kansas a desert.

But maybe that's why I love the book so much. Maybe because the book is more than just a girl wanting to hump a guy or a wallpaper science fiction novel is why I want to squeeze and hug and love this book to death.

Maybe I love this book because the characters and situations, while maddeningly frustrating, are so gorram real. Cat is one of the most selfish, unlikable, lazy, unmotivated protagonists I've read in awhile. And yet, I liked her. I know, it's weird, but I could understand a lot of the reasons why she did what she did. I got why she ran off to college. I got her responses to other character's death. I understand why she married who she did. It made sense to me - even as I was yelling at her not to do it.

And all the characters were this way - Finn, Daniel, Richard, Cat's mom, Cat's art friends. They weren't bad, they weren't good, they were PEOPLE. Believable, relatable, realistic people, warts and all.

Or maybe I love this book because at the end of the day, it's more a character study, more about the humanity of the machine and the machinations of humanity than it is about Girl Meets Boy and Wants In His Pants. Is it wrong for Cat to love Finn, to be intimate with him, when he has no feelings? Can machines love? What does it all mean, when you get more feelings from a machine than a human being?

No, this isn't perfect. There are slow spots. There are maddening character decisions. And the book is rather melancholy, right up until the very end. And speaking of the end, gorrammit, why was it so gorram short?! All this time, and we get a couple of pages and BOOM! Over?! WRONG!

BUT I DON'T CARE! I love the writing, I love the characters, I love how it is more than it seems from the outside, I LOVE THIS BOOK.

[Deb Omnivorous Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

Four and a half stars! But until Goodreads gives us half stars, it deserves the five.

Cat is the daughter of a scientist, well two really, because her father is a cybernetics scientist and his wife also worked in the field, although it is not clear if she still is working at the time the book covers. The story begins when Cat is a small child, about the age to start school. One day her father brings Finn home and establishes him as Cat’s tutor. Initially Cat is scared of him, sure he is a ghost but he is not a ghost, he is an android and while she is a child he is her tutor but he later becomes her close friend and confidant. The story follows Cat as she goes to high school, ‘college’ and then on into her life, she leaves the family home and Finn behind as she moves into the world but Finn is always a central part of her world. As her world gets more complicated so does their relationship.

This book was really quite extraordinary; beautifully written with a vivid yet subtle descriptiveness that effortlessly drew me in. The writing style is very light handed, making the reading feel effortless and while the characters are not flamboyant they are complex, fascinatingly drawn and completely believable.

Cat herself is a bit of a drifter, she drifts through childhood, and then much of her adult life without strong ties or goals and with a level of emotional detachment that is very believable based on her early life. the romance that develops between her and Finn is entirely convincing, based on the theory that children imprint on the faces around them when they are young, for future partners. Her parents were less involved in her growth than Finn, and so she imprinted on him, then as she grew he remained the same age until she caught up…. Also based on that early life I felt that Cat’s detachment from friends and lovers, her inability to form strong connections, made a lot of sense. It was logically convincing and the lovely writing made it extremely readable In fact all of Cat's life seems convincingly real, her relationships with her parents, her post college career, it is all a nicely laid out reality, very ordinary save for that one extraordinary fact; that her best friend is an android, a 'machine'.

The back cover claims “File Under Science Fiction” but I have to say I am doubtful: As a science fiction book, this is hard to rate, it is very VERY sci-fi Lite. While we are presented with a world that is ‘post disasters’ we never really are told anything much about those disasters, they are basically the scene design for the development of robots, but nothing much more. Humanities numbers were apparently reduced, but we gather that they have come back again. Some areas were destroyed, but we spend our time largely in regions that survived. Most, almost all of the tech is entirely consistent with modern day tech except the robots. The tablets, the automated houses, these are things we have developed already, the space travel may be something we have not yet done, but we have the tech already And so, based on the diffident world building, which could equally be describing the world today or the world twenty years ago, I would be inclined to say that this is not so much a science fiction as a speculative fiction.

Also, as a long term sci-fi reader I found myself in the early chapters referencing other books along the way: Asimov, Aldiss, Heinlein, Tanith Lee, movies like AI and Blade Runner, so many of those classic science fiction novelists and the movies inspired by them have also worked with concepts explored in this book: When is an individual self aware? What makes a ‘human’? At no point, however did I find myself thinking “this has been done before” while I saw the similarities in the exploration of the concepts I found Cassandra’s take unique. Ultimately while all such stories explore the question of humanity, intelligence and self-awareness and the gulf between a person and other I think this book approaches many of the concepts in a fresh light.

One thing, about this book annoyed the living daylights out of me (and is why I would reduce it by half a star). The editing has a quirk and that quirk is the excessive, obsessive and infuriating overuse of hyphens. I can’t even start to describe how annoying I found it! Through the first hundred pages or so, just as I was sinking happily into the story I would be rudely jarred out of it by one of these…. What are they? I can’t decide if it is an Americanism, like the overuse of Z, or an editing error. At first I thought it was an unsuccessful attempt to give the characters an accent of some kind. Examples are cov-ered, in-terested, unfin-ished and disap-pear. Even worse, in a single paragraph you can have the same word appear twice, one with and one without the hyphen. It was this last thing that makes me hope that more editing will eliminate this. As I have been lucky enough to get an Advance proof, maybe this thing will be ironed out by the sale quality and I really, really hope so.

Until then, four and a half stars because the story was so very well done!

[Heather ~*dread mushrooms*~ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Buddy read with Karly in October.

This is how I feel about reading this book:



REVIEW

We all know what happens when your expectations for a book are too high, don't we? This is how I feel now:



I've read this story before, and it was done better. The Silver Metal Lover by Tanith Lee is about a girl and the robot she loves. The difference is (besides way better worldbuilding and actual sci-fi things) the MC of TSML fights magnificently for her love, while in this book Cat ... does not.

A lot of reviewers seem to have problems with Cat, and I get that. She was selfish and stupid. Did she even make choices or just go along with what she thought was supposed to do, because this futuristic world resembled one where second-wave feminism apparently never happened? Despite her flaws, I still felt she was just human. Everyone is selfish to some degree. Her flaws were the least of my issues.

Finn. Everyone loves Finn. I would have loved Finn, if the author had actually worked to make him likeable and not, dare I say it, so robotic. I get that he was reserved and unfamiliar with how to show emotion. I love me an emotionally unavailable love interest, but I just didn't connect. The writing, while there was nothing technically wrong with it, didn't give me anything to latch on to.

And then there's my issue with their relationship, which is the crux of the novel. So, basically, these two have sex once in a while, in between whatever else they do in their lives? Am I supposed to care? There is no motivation for this. No reasoning. No buildup. Oh, it's bad and uncouth for a human to be with an android? Show me, don't tell me. Show me why Cat should or shouldn't have fought for her love. Did someone else die because of robot love? Did a mob reduce an android to scrap metal? Show me the suffering. Real suffering, not the suffering of not being able to make a decision.

This has to be my biggest disappointment of the year.

I was going to do a brief rewrite of this story to tell how I thought it should have gone, but the ending of the book took care of that for me. So, yay, I guess? Too bad I had to read almost 400 pages of blah to get there.

[Erin O'Roark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alright. Let me wipe the tears off my kindle so I can see what I'm typing.

Holy sh-i-te. That was a ride. I think my heart physically hurts from the 336 pages of emotional rollercoast-ing.

Welcome to Forrest Gump...with ROBOTS! And also told from the story of Jenny. That's really the vibe I got with this book.

***MILD SPOILERS***

This book was a hard pill for me to swallow. It was unique in so many ways in that I got to read and felt as though I lived the life of our main character, Caterina. I cried when she cried, loved when she loved and felt numb when she felt numb.

But here's the thing....I freaking hated her. She was the WORST, most naive and annoying woman in the world. Until the end of the book when I realized it was meant to be that way. She is one who lives a second chance and a new birth. She goes through life just sort of "existing", never feeling anything real until our robot friend touches her soul and that's the only time she knows she's truly alive. I thought this was an absolutely beautiful concept.

But then the baby happened. And I have to say that was the biggest boner kill I've read in a while. I felt her pregnancy added nothing to the story and all in all was extremely predictable from the moment she decided to get married.

Then, whilst pregnant, constantly says "Baby, your daddy..." (in reference to the robot who, by the way, is not the father) but once said robot is actually back in the picture she NEVER TELLS HER CHILD WHO THE FATHER IS.

WHAT!? You emotionally manipulative asshole.

Besides this one hiccup, I genuinely enjoyed this quick read. I fell in love with the characters and on more than one embarrassing occasion cried so hard I hiccuped.

I highly recommend this to girls who are PMS'ing but can't cry because their emotions are so muddled. This will get you going. TRUST ME.

[Rashika (is tired) · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s been two weeks since I’ve read this book and I still don’t feel ready to write a review. I’d rather just post all the quotes I collected and force people to read this book. Because yes this book was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I knew that would be the case before I went in (I have good instincts okay?) but that still didn’t prepare me for the amount of love I would feel for this book.

I’ll admit I didn’t cry while reading it but I wanted to. I had class right after I finished this book and I was so worried I’d start bawling right in the middle of, and I did come close to doing just that. Even thinking about this book just makes me wish I could hug someone who understands why this book is so fucking special.

The thing is that there isn’t a particular scene or chapter that breaks your heart. The WHOLE book is heartbreaking. Finn is. Cat is. Everything about this book is. But then there are also those parts that make your heart soar.

I actually tried to take it slow but gave in to my need to know what became of Finn and Cat, but the book did last 3 days.

This book takes place over the course of many years, from when Cat was a bright little kid to when Cat became a subdued adult.

Cat is the daughter of two scientists. They’ve never had enough time for her and they don’t really believe in sending her to school so they get her a robot tutor, Finn. She thought he was a ghost at first and was afraid of him, she even went so far as to take him to a graveyard to see if he would move on but he didn’t. The fact that he could tell her tons of story convinced her to finally be his ‘friend’. She never really realized he was a robot though so she never understood why he gave her such detailed answers. Here is a quote from the first scene that broke my heart.

“You’re boring,” she told him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t wish to be.”

She learned at a dinner party that he wasn’t in fact a ghost but a robot and her first reaction was relief, she was relieved that her most favorite person in the world wasn’t in fact dead

“I don’t mind that you’re a computer.” She ran up to him and wrapped her arms around his legs, leaning her head against his hip. He put his hand on her shoulder, and the weight of it seemed to sink straight through her.
“I’m glad,” he said.

But as she becomes older, she finds herself attracted to Finn which makes things awkward because how can you be attracted to a robot? I am not even going to rebuke her for thinking like that because there was a point early on in the book where I pondered that myself, I fell in love with Finn quite early on but it took me a couple of chapters to get used to the idea. But even with her own confusion about her feelings she was always protective of Finn.

She didn’t trust the grown-ups waiting in the house, the people who knew Finn for what he was the minute they laid eyes on him, the people who called him it.

But as she matures into an adult her parents start paying more attention to her. They don’t approve of her relationship with Finn and think she should spend time with people her own age. So after years of being homeschooled by Finn, she is forced to go to school where she doesn’t get along with most people. She even gets into a fist fight with someone who dared to insult Finn.

Before I go on, I just want to mention her parents. They come off as unfeeling at first and I didn’t like them much but Clarke pulls it off, she doesn’t cast them as the normal cliché of absent parents, you come to understand why her mom was the way she was and even love her father, the mad scientist.

I could probably base this whole review on Cat’s life and fill it up with quotes but the point is that Cat spends so much of her time running away from how she feels about Finn. She dates people that look like Finn, marries a guy she doesn’t give a rat’s ass about who also turns out to be abusive. You want to shake her but at the same time you want to hug her. She is so lonely for most part of the book, going through the motions and not even realizing what she really wants. When she finally stands up for herself, I was so happy. I practically jumped out of my chair and.. ran around??

The thing about Cat is that she is such a human character, she screws up, runs away from her feelings, constantly deludes herself, isn’t particularly strong, in fact I don’t think you’re meant to like her, just understand her, but I ended up loving her even though she bothered me some. It’s because of the realness of her character.

“Yes,” he said. “A violation.” His eyes vibrated. “But how could you know that? You can’t be shut off.”

While this book is based on Cat’s life, this is definitely Finn’s story, and my god it’s a heartbreaking story. I realize I’ve already said that a gazillion times and now it just seems like I am shoving it down your throats but I feel the need to reinforce the point because it’s Finn that constantly breaks your heart, not Cat. The thing about Finn is that he is a pretty mysterious character, half the time it’s hard to figure out what goes on in his mind aside from his obvious feelings for Cat, but even then you cannot help but feel for him. He seems so human to us readers but people in his world don’t see that, to him he is just a mechanical unfeeling object and they treat him as such. And for the most part Finn readily accepts that because that’s what he feels defines him.

I realize I haven’t talked about much else, like perhaps the plot but I don’t even know where to begin with that, this book is like a coming of age story. Except both characters are adults (well one is a robot but you get what I mean). It’s a story about opening up to true love and looking beyond just yourself. It’s a story about finally being happy again. It’s a story about many goddamned things. Honestly this book reminds me so much of Artificial Intelligence, which was one of my all-time favorite movies.

I don’t even think what I wrote can be called a review, it’s hardly coherent and it was emotionally exhausting having to revisit everything that this book makes me feel, in fact I had goosebumps almost the whole time I was writing this review and right now my heart just feels heavy.

This book is heartbreaking and wonderful and I wish I could marry it (Finn). There I said it. It’ll stay with me for a long long time but if you’re not one for an angst filled book even when the main character is a grownup, skip this, or if you can make an exception (like I did), DO IT, READ THIS BOOK, LOVE IT, and cry with me over it.


This review has also been posted onmy blog

Before Reading
Have you ever wanted to read a book so bad but at the same time you want to run away from it?
Yeah that's me with this book.
I really really really want to read it because I love Cassandra. She is a great writer ( The Assassin's Curse was super awesome) but reading the reviews, I know this book will make me cry. For a book to make me cry means that it's deeply moving. I don't even need to read reviews to know it's going to make an emotional mess out of me. I just KNOW. This is why I am so SCARED to read it. I really hope sometime in the future I convince myself because I know this book will be worth it.

[Mimi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A post-apocalyptic fairy tale for the robotics age about a girl who falls in love with a mechanical boy. I picked this book up on a whim not knowing much about it other than the author's name, which sounded vaguely familiar, and I'm glad I gave it a chance because it's a great story told by a talented writer.

This is YA but not too YA that it lost me completely. There's enough YA in it for those who like YA, and there's enough robot things in it for those who like robots and robot theories. The writing is engaging and uncomplicated, but the ideas presented are complex and compelling. Many of Isaac Asimov's concepts of AI and robotics are examined through the love story, and I found that the author did a good job bringing these ideas to the present age and applying them to modern sensibilities. This is a long about way of saying this book can double as political satire since it explores issues concerning the humanity of robots, particularly their sentience and autonomy.

Recommended for people who like a blend of fairy tale and sci-fi.


More reviews at https://covers2covers.wordpress.com/2...

[jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

 i 
 am 
 in 
 love.

cassandra rose clarke squished my heart into a bloody pulp in the palms of her hands. thank you! and moar please?

[Michael · Rating 2 out of 5]

Cat’s life was not ever going to be normal; the daughter of a mad scientist can never be easy. When her father created an android to be her tutor, she was a little afraid to begin with but soon Finn became her best friend. While Finn is programmed to assist his owners, this billion dollar construction becomes a whole lot more to Cat. The Mad Scientist’s Daughter is a coming of age novel with a science fiction twist.

While this is a coming of age type novel, it’s both Cat and Finn that have to try and find their place in the world. Cat, as she grows up into an intelligent woman, and Finn, as the government look into granting rights to the increasing android population. As a young girl who grows up with only one person to talk to, it comes as no surprise to see that she forms a strong emotional bond with Finn, but I can’t help but wonder if the author took it a little too far. I can fully accept this young adult to fall in love with the android that has always been there when she needs it the most, but the sex, seemed a little weird and really threw me out of the story. I’m not going to debate the idea of sex and androids because I’m sure there a many thoughts on this concept; just for this novel it really threw me off.

There really are some interesting concepts coming through in this novel Firstly the interesting science fiction twist on the coming of age novel; not only does Cat grow and struggle though life, I really thought the idea of Finn finding himself in an evolving world was explored in a decent way. Then the concept of loving someone that can never love you back. It’s clear that Cat is in denial at times, hoping that Finn will return her feelings but always getting hurt by the fact that he doesn’t; this is a long struggle she deals with and created a great emotional impact for the protagonist and the reader. Finally the increased population with robotics; this was never explored as well as someone like Isaac Asimov did but it was still interesting to read Cassandra Rose Clarke on this subject.

At times this dragged on a long time, but I found myself being fully absorbed in the novel only to be yanked out with the sex scenes. I’m not sure if they really needed to be in the book; I think they could have portrayed the love Cat has for Finn without it. It was these sudden jerks that destroyed this book for me. I tend to think the author was adding a bit of controversy to get the book talked about but for me it didn’t make me want to ponder the concept, it just made me want to resort to skim reading.

This review originally appeared on my blog; http://literary-exploration.com/2013/...

[Liz Janet · Rating 2 out of 5]

“Desire is simple," he said. "Desire is something even a machine can understand." There was a stillness in the air that mirrored the stillness of his body. "But when I desired you I began to love you. You were the first being I ever loved. I didn't know it, of course. I had no idea what it meant, no idea what I was feeling. Love was never something I was supposed to experience. I don't think I was supposed to know desire, either, but she never expected me to meet you." He laughed against her skin. "Later, after your father… when he took out those restrictions, I was finally able to understand the complexities of love. Even if I didn't want to. At first.”

This is not a science-fiction book, my belief of this was what drove me to not enjoy this story as much as I would have, if I had been told it is a story of romance and finding oneself. It follows Cat and Finn, I say both because I refuse to speak of one without the other, because they make each other into the people they later become.
This is a book that uses the androids as a lower human being, a social commentary on racism. Some people see them as less than human, abominations, not worthy of being alive (one character even comments that they are stealing the human's jobs, something I am tired of hearing on television), while others see them as androids that can become human once their restrictions on feelings are lifted. These creations are denied feelings, because they are to be servants, but if something that science-fiction novels and Battlestar Galactica has taught us, is that it is never enough, one will always advance into humans, and sometimes, it will probably take a bloody war. Androids are the other, the creatures to be feared because they are coming to steal everything from you. The other is usually portrayed as inhuman, they are terrorists, the blacks, the Asians, the Hispanics, the Arabs, the homosexuals, the disabled; the gypsies, the religious, the non-religious, all of the minorities. Often times they are portrayed in a more human way, we know of their families, friends, but with Finn we know nothing but of his creation, he has no family, and only one friend, but he matters, and later on, he will show the traits many humans refuse to show, compassion, love, admiration, warmth.
This is a novel worthy of a re-read, just so that I can feel satisfied that I have judged it fairly.

[Mogsy · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 of 5 stars at The BiblioSanctum: http://bibliosanctum.blogspot.com/201...

The Mad Scientist's Daughter ended up giving me all sorts of contradictory and inconsistent feelings. Even though I loved this novel, there were still a ton of things that drove me nuts about it, and yet I can't help but suspect a lot of it was by design.

First of all, while I enjoyed this book, I also have to say it was also one of the most depressing stories I've ever read. Even though the tagline is "A tale of love, loss and robots", I don't actually think it was meant to be that depressing (in fact, it's got a pretty happy ending) but here you have a main character who's just so pitiful and tragic and even pathetic, I couldn't even bring myself to hate her for her many, many flaws.

At its heart, The Mad Scientist's Daughter is a deep analysis and portrayal of Caterina Novak, daughter of a brilliant yet a eccentric inventor and cybernetics expert, and we follow her character's development from childhood to her adult years. Cat is five years old when she first meets Finn, the android her father brings home to be her tutor. But as Cat grows, she discovers Finn is different from other androids. With every year that passes their relationship becomes increasingly complicated, as Cat starts to see Finn as someone more than just a tutor and friend.

And yet, what Cat attributes to love for Finn, I see it more as an obsession. I wouldn't really consider this book a love story or a true romance, and if it was meant to be, then it missed its mark completely. If you're looking for romantic tension or chemistry between two characters, you're not really going to find it here. For most of the book, Cat's feelings are mostly one-sided, and for all the times we're told Finn is sentient and one of a kind, the author still never manages to make him seem quite human enough.

So yeah, I pretty much just spent a lot of time feeling bad and really sorry for Cat. Like I said, depressing.

Still, the fact I am able to express any sympathy for her at all is an incredible achievement in itself. It's like Cat is always in her own little world, with Finn being the only thing ever on her mind. She snaps at people, not understanding why they might not feel the same way about androids as she does. She marries a man (who turned out to be a grade-A dick but genuinely did love her) out of convenience. She donates to a charity that defends androids, but I'm not convinced she actually believes in the cause or if it's more likely she's driven by her guilt and Finn obsession.

By rights, such a self-absorbed and angst-ridden character should turn me right off, but somehow Cat manages to make me like her. Maybe it's because we all know nobody's perfect. Or that when it comes to that special someone, no one can help the way they feel. I felt Cat's pain of loving someone she believed she could never have. I felt her helplessness of knowing she shouldn't have those feelings but turning them off is also easier said than done. We've all been there. That I could relate to her made it easier to overlook her many faults.

Before this, I'd only read Cassandra Rose Clarke's young adult novels and I was really keen to see what she could do with a longer, more mature story. In the end I was quite happy with the book The Mad Scientist's Daughter turned out to be. It isn't an exploration into the humanity of intelligent machines like Asimov's Bicentennial Man or the movie A.I. Artificial Intelligence, or at least it isn't its central focus; instead, the delineation of Cat's personality takes center stage, and the plot takes a backseat to the dynamics in her relationships with Finn and, to a lesser extent, her mother and father. The premise is a cool idea, even if the story ultimately turned out to be a horribly heartbreaking one for me.

[Branwen Sedai *of the Brown Ajah* · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I realized, after you asked me if I thought you were pretty, that I needed to work with a different algorithm. Previously, I had only contemplated the concept of beauty in regards to works of art. But the definition of beauty in a human being is different than the definition of beauty in an object. This is a philosophical question, of course, and philosophy is difficult for me. It's too abstract. I sill have problems with abstraction." He paused. His eyes shook. "I considered facial shape and the writings of Vitruvius. I also took into account my own experiences with you. I find it...pleasant to be around you."

He looked at her then. Cat's skin warmed.

"So my answer to your question," he said, "is yes. I do think you are pretty."

Cat's heart stopped beating, and then started again, fluttery and strange.

When Cat was just a little girl, her brilliant father brought home an android named Finn to be her tutor. He looks and feels and moves like a person...but yet isn't a person. As time passes and Cat grows up, her relationship with Finn deepens and blossoms and because something much more powerful than simple friendship. But just how much can Finn feel? How much of him is him or an act of his programming?

I have sort of a soft spot for books that feature human girls falling in love with androids or robots. There is something just so alien and spellbinding thinking about that sort of love, that sort of relationship. But this book is so much more than just THAT story. This book absolutely blew my mind and heart apart with it's deep and poignant beauty. It is so many things all wrapped up in one book; dystopian, science-fiction, philosophical, romance. It raises as many questions as it answered. In what sort of parameters can love be defined? What is the basis for human consciousness? When does a machine stop being a machine and start being...something else? I loved every single page of this book from beginning to end. The characters were all insightfully crafted, and the writing style was just a perfect blend of beautiful description and raw emotion. There is ugliness in this book. But there is also beauty too. And the romance between Finn and Cat was literally one of the most amazing things I have ever read about in my life.

He had no heartbeat but she could hear something spinning inside of him. She was entranced by it. Like white noise, like the recorded sound of stars.

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would like to join the reviewers who state that the synopsis is misleading since it gives the impression that the novel is about Finn. It is not. The novel is about Cat, she is the centre from the first page and until the last one.

In many ways this book is deeply philosophical. It concerns itself with artificial intelligence, with the definition of love, with consciousness, with those who make decisions guided by society's definitions of right and wrong instead of their own hearts and heads and with the root of emotions. I would not describe this book as light or particularly beautiful in the sense that it does not sugercoat the mistakes and missteps of the characters and does not point out a hero or a villian unlike so many other books. Instead, every character is a bit of a hero and simultaneously a bit of a villian. This is the beauty and horror of life and in regard to this the novel is hauntingly realistic. Perhaps it is the most "real" book I've read in a long time.
The atmosphere of the book is not exactly light either. Maybe it's just me but I think there is very little happiness in this book. Linked with the beautiful, simple and somewhat emotionally raw writing it had quite a strong effect on me. The book is full of nostalgia, angst and suffering. Not the kind of suffering that makes me emotional though, but the kind that leaves me pondering over questions all of us prefer not to raise.
You see, there is an unexpected depth in this book, one that I enjoyed despite the overall pessimism, hopelessness and melancholia.

The next statement I would like to make is that it is a character-driven book, not a plot-driven one. There is no action or thrill to it. And it is slow. Very slow at times because it is about Cat, how she grows from a dreamy girl into a confused teenager and into a bitter, seclusive woman who is described as an 'ice queen', quite fittingly I think.
Accordingly, the story is more concerned with the growth of the characters than anything else.
Which brings me to Cat. She is not likable. Not even close to being likable. And not one of those antagonists whom you love to hate either. You just hate her. Because she is afraid of acting against society's expectations, against everything that she has been taught, she retreats more and more inside herself until people are unable to reach her and soon stop reaching for her at all. She doubts and despairs and gives up and follows the familiar, safe path that does not make her happy until she is the inhabitant of a glass house. By the way, I think there is a very beautiful symbolism when it comes to her being inside the glass house with all the technology.
I would go so far as to state that we all have a Cat inside us. One that would rather do something because those around us say you should than act recklessly according to our own desires. You see, she portrays the weak, not very pleasant side of being human. I didn't like her, but I understood which I think is sometimes more important.

Now Finn is a whole different story, not that he is perfect. He is an android. Androids do not feel, there is nothing even remotely human about them, they can be bought and sold. Except that everything is not as simple as it seems.
I think Finn is a remarkable character in every sense. He is no bad boy, but no golden boy either. He does so many things wrong, and so many things right. Finn seems like the kind of person to me that is often not appreciated, that is always there, helping and supporting, but is taken for granted. Such people and characters are often overlooked. I loved that it isn't the case in this one. That he shows backbone and character, that he confronts Cat, that he does not just put up with her selfishness, her inability to make a decision, her blindness and indifference towards the feelings of others.
The other characters are nice, but the book focuses mostly on Cat, her inner turmoils and Finn, so there is not much of them to see which I found a bit disappointing to be honest.
A bit more backstory, a bit more of the other characters would have been nice because at times Cat was too much for me and the lack of any kind of action did not make it much better.

I understand that more than anything it is a tale of a person's life and growth, a tale of change that raises quite interesting questions and I liked it, but sometimes - just sometimes - it was a bit too heavy.
Still highly recommended, although I'd like to warn you, I would not describe the book as a sci-fi novel. It focuses on the love story and not on the sci-fi part of it. Actually, the sci-fi part falls rather short.

[Jasprit · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

I absolutely loved Cassandra Rose Clarke’s debut novel The Assassin’s Curse, that when I saw a couple of friends mentioning The Mad Scientist’s Daughter I knew I had to request a copy. I know look at me branching out of my contemporary comfort zone. If someone told me this time last year that I would be reading more fantasy and sci-fi books I would have just given them a blank look. But I’m glad to say The Mad Scientist’s Daughter is another book I extremely enjoyed.

The concept of robots living amongst us I admit I find fascinating. I was a girl who grew up watching Short Circuit, Robocop and Terminator, films where scientists created robots (excluding Terminator) to live among humans. The Mad Scientist’s Daughter follows a similar concept, when Cat is just five years old her dad brings a robot to stay with them at their house. Cat being young doesn’t know what he is, he doesn’t look like a robot, and he acts human enough so she mistakes him for a ghost. The robot Finn, was only initially bought home to help Cat’s dad around the house, he’s a scientist and obviously needs an assistant. But before you know it Finn starts spending more time with Cat, he becomes her tutor much to the annoyance of her mother. And soon enough Cat forms a strong friendship with Finn, a friendship that most people wouldn’t foresee or accept. With more and more robots cropping up around the area, in stores as assistants people are used to them being around but refer to them as it rather than a person. But that’s not the case for Cat; Finn was around for her when she was stranded, when she needed him to cover for her, so he became an important part of her life.

With the films I grew up watching (later on I became obsessed with I, Robot) I kind of thought I had a feeling which way this book would go, I honestly didn’t read the blurb but went with my gut instinct that this would be a solid read as it was by Clarke. And I’m glad to say it didn’t disappoint, but I assumed the robots would start malfunctioning and threaten to take over the world (blame my childhood films for this assumption) at one point when Cat’s mum died I thought Finn had caused the accident! So I was quite surprised the route this book took, but I did like it. I liked the themes it explored, how different Finn was to the other robots, how Cat’s family were too late to really appreciate how lucky they were to have him around before it was too late.

Despite the solid start, however I did have a couple of issues, firstly Cat’s behaviour over the course of the story did begin to aggravate me, it was glaringly obvious how things were meant to be, but she was frustrating as she didn’t do anything about it. I wanted to shake her a few times until she saw sense. But I suppose the way things developed made her realise. Also there was a definite lull in pacing during the middle of the book, it did cause my attention to waver slightly, but thankfully the last third of the book was able to bounce back into its brilliant pace it had started off with.

The Mad Scientist’s Daughter was so different to what I would usually pick up, but I’m glad I gave it a go because it thoroughly took me by surprise.

[Scarlet · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

Despite spanning nearly thirty-odd years, there is something extremely still and perpetually sad about this story. Liked it a lot more than I expected to.

[Nafiza · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was not an easy novel to read on many accounts. In fact, I still don’t quite know how I feel about it.

The biggest problem I had was the pacing. The novel, instead of occurring within a set of period of time, follows Cat, the titular daughter, from a very young age until she is in her mid-thirties (or so I deduced from the amount of time that had passed). Events occurred and then recurred and things just seemed to go around a circle without any progress being made. It felt that we (the readers) continued to see Cat make mistakes, choose the wrong thing over and over again. This is not to imply that there wasn’t internal progress being made, there was, but it just made for very frustrating reading.

It is fascinating to see the gradual progression of feelings that Cat has for Finn. From feeling revulsion for him to being unable to stop thinking about him to denying she feels anything for him. Her conflict is pretty easy to understand: how can you be in love with a thing, a thing that looks, talks and breathes like a person but at the end of the day, is not a person. A thing that does not have a soul or even a heart or even emotions. How can you feel and love something like that?

The book engages in themes of the meaning of humanity. What does being human mean? What is a human being? These are all questions I think we’ll be grappling with in the future if sentient robots are created. When Finn finds his emotions, learns to think and perhaps to feel, does he cross some boundary and become human? The sex troubled me the most, to be honest. Cat orders him to sleep with her and he does. I wondered whether it was a violation of sorts. Finn cannot really refuse, right? He has to obey and so he does. Is that a violation of his body? What am I supposed to think about Cat who uses him to sate her desire for a man she can never have?

At the climax, after that long (extended) journey through Cat’s lives, being with her as she married the wrong man, made the wrong decisions and mourned the people she loved, seeing her almost within the grasp of happiness is a strange feeling. She has learned a lot, grown from the little girl who thought Finn was a ghost. The novel is strange, clunky and yet all the more readable for it. It asks some very difficult questions and while it doesn’t expect any clear answers, it does expect that you, the reader, will think about the questions it raises. Finn may be a fictional character and his life may be the product of an author’s imagination but there is no guarantee that such a situation will never arise in reality. How will we feel about robots who look, feel and think like humans but aren’t really humans? Can you love something like that? Should you be allowed to? I don’t know. I really don’t.

I think you should read the book. Make up your own mind. Think your own thoughts about it. And then come talk to me about them.

[Heidi · Rating 2 out of 5]

In Cassandra Rose Clarke’s sophomore novel, The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, she has worked to show us that her creative mind fires in all variety of ways, creating a world and story one wouldn’t necessarily expect from the creator of the young adult fantasy adventure, The Assassin’s Curse. While I applaud Clarke for turning her hand to something new, I have to acknowledge that the audience for these two works will be extremely different, and even I as an eclectic reader do not fall into both categories. I wanted more from The Mad Scientist’s Daughter. I wanted Clarke’s insight and take on moral dilemmas we as a society are bound to run into in the not-so-distant future, and I wanted an emotional story that would grip my heart and color my life. Instead, I was left feeling as bleak and devoid as this work’s beautiful but grey cover.

Due to my enjoyment of The Assassin’s Curse, I was determined to read The Mad Scientist’s Daughter despite it meeting at a glance two of my personal dealbreakers:

1) A character named Finn.
2) A The ________’s Daughter title.

If any of you read this article on The Millions last year, you’ll know that I can’t be the only one getting a little sick of this naming trend, which has increased substantially over the last two decades:


Books Titled The ___’s Daughter, 1990-2011
Data and Image via The Millions.

And if you think it’s a trend that’s dying down, I feel the need to point out that this month marks the release of not only The Mad Scientists’s Daughter, but also The Madman’s Daughter by Megan Shepard. That’s not confusing to readers at all. Now, I’m sure no one’s bothered to compile such data on characters named Finn because that really might just be me, but I’m willing to bet the graph would look similar. At least the green eye trend seems to be falling off.

Perhaps I should have followed my instincts and known that The Mad Scientist’s Daughter would not be the right fit for me. Cassandra Rose Clarke tells the story of Cat, the titular mad scientist’s daughter, following her from early childhood well into adulthood, along with her relationship with the android who works with her father, Finn. I craved more from Cat’s experiences–what it was like to be her father’s daughter, how she truly felt about A.I. in general, how she interacted with the world at large. Instead, I felt we were following the story of a selfish, petulant human being who endlessly self-sabotaged her life and grew little as a person.

I don’t always need to love my main characters, but when I don’t, I need there to be a something that keeps bringing me back to the story. For The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, it was the hope that Clarke would delve into the moral issues she had presented through her tale. I wanted to know more about how the world had come to toss aside art and language for such a strong focus on math and science. I wanted to flush out her relationship with a mother who believed it was wrong for a woman to do anything but have a career in a time and age where they had the option to choose. I wanted to know more about how Cat’s mind worked–how she was able to see art, beauty, and humanity in that technology which drove the current society. I wanted to know how she was able to love someone she also truly believed could never feel anything for her in return. Cat donates to the cause of sentient A.I. gaining human rights, and yet, it’s not because she actually believes in it, it’s because it makes her feel better about the path she has chosen to take. I wanted to see more internal struggle with the fact that she was taking advantage of someone she saw as a man because the rest of the world saw him as a machine. I feel as if in 400 pages, Clarke had plenty of time to give us a closer look at these aspects of her world, but instead the pages were filled up with needless descriptions of unimportant things.

The imperfections I saw in Clarke’s writing when I read her debut persisted in The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, but because I wasn’t swept away be the story I was unable to brush them aside. There was so much telling being done in The Mad Scientist’s Daughter, and not enough showing. I found myself unable to care whatsoever about Cat or her fate because she didn’t allow me to–instead she as a character holds readers at arm’s length in the same manner that she holds off other human beings. Ideas were presented, but never looked into, and what tale there was lacked the depth it needed to prop it up. The story can be boiled down to one selfish woman’s personal journey, but it could have been so much more.

Clarke has successfully established herself as an author able to craft a variety of speculative fiction, however, she has also shown that not all of her works will be targeted for one audience. This is in no way a bad thing, in fact it is impressive to successfully write in a variety of genres and for various age groups, but it will make me more wary to pick up her books in the future.

Review originally published at Bunbury in the Stacks.

[Kogiopsis · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a bit odd to shelve a book on my yearly fave shelf that I only rate 3 stars but... then, my feelings on this book are odd. I loved it, but it made me deeply uncomfortable, and 3 stars is really the only compromise I can make.

The Mad Scientist's Daughter is an incredibly well-written work. I found myself repeatedly taken aback by how realistic it felt - almost less like a novel and more like a very poetic biography, meandering in the nonlinear way of a human life rather than following conventional plot structure. Encounters, relationships, and life events happen in a fluid movement from one moment - or one period of Cat's life - to the next. I can't imagine what writing the first draft of this was like; it doesn't see to lend itself to outlines. One of the primary things I took away from this was an intense respect for Cassandra Rose Clarke's mastery of her craft, and that makes me definitely interested in reading her other work. (Also notable: the subtlety in descriptions of the weather over time that suggested that the world is continuing to inexorably warm, that the 'Disaster' that turned the Midwest to a desert has hardly been halted. That was artfully done.)

As for the content of this book: it's a very slow story of character growth and emotion. Other readers have commented on Cat's selfishness, which is not just illustrated but commented on (repeatedly, by Cat herself), and indeed the central arc of the book seems to be her recognizing and overcoming. She's a fascinating person to read about, though, because her selfishness is almost... sympathetic, in a way. Ignored by her parents as a child, isolated from others, out of place in the roles her society and family consider most valuable (she may even have dyscalculia? the descriptions of her early struggles with math definitely seemed to suggest that) - her growth from wild independent child into selfish, closed-off adult is natural and understandable, even as it leads her into a series of decisions that harm both her and others around her.

The thing is, it's the intensity and the realism of this book which made it uncomfortable for me to read in a lot of parts. The content skews a lot darker than I had anticipated, especially as the book's central theme is one of agency: Finn's assumed lack of it, as a robot; Cat's assumed possession of it, which is proven time and again to not be all it seems. In exploring this concept, Clarke touches on nonconsensual drug use, a lot of sex (inc. some with dubious consent), spousal abuse, and death and the grieving process. It hits hard. Cat spends a lot of the book in an extremely disassociated state, which was difficult for me; as someone who experiences disassociation in my own life as a result of an anxiety disorder, borrowing Cat's experiences put me on edge.

More stuff about sex and consent, under a cut for spoilers: I didn't realize until the very end how much the handling of sex, especially sex between Cat and Finn, bothered me. Only when they were talking in the kitchen and she activated his 'second little death' program - to allow him to experience orgasm for the first time - did it occur to me how downright creepy their relationship was, and that howevermuch Cat grew emotionally outside of it, she reverted to selfish immaturity when presented with Finn. Consider: in the middle of a conversation where they could have discussed their past and their emotions like adults and actually communicated (the lack thereof, and assumed lack of need for it, having caused all of their problems), what Cat did was use Finn's robotic nature in a way he didn't understand, without his express consent. I mean, what she's doing involves using his deactivation switch, which is exactly the thing that broke his trust in her the first time - what the fuck kind of emotional resolution is that? It doesn't require Cat to be more mature than she was at the beginning, or to treat Finn more like a person with agency - it requires Finn to surrender himself to her, to literally put his consciousness in her hands.

Then there's the fact that neither Cat nor the narrative ever, at any point, raise the question of whether Finn could actually give consent to sleeping with her. He insists multiple times that everything about him is programmed, and Cat thinks repeatedly that 'his kindness is just a program', and yet nobody wonders whether he's programmed to do what she asks, unable to refuse sex? Sure, Finn accuses her of using him - but for treating him like a fling and never someone worthy of a relationship, not for the fact that she assumed he had the psychological functionality and used him for sex regardless. Gross.

I think, in the end, my feelings on this book are the following: I respect the hell out of it, but I just couldn't enjoy it.

[Helen · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a beautiful yet heart-rending story. I've cried and cried over this with sadness, joy and heartbreak. This should be a compulsory read. I'm definitely getting the rest of her works.

[Danielle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read This Review & More Like It At Ageless Pages Reviews

No summary could do The Mad Scientist’s Daughter justice. Look up there. That is an awful summary. I don’t want to read that book. That makes the story look like it’s about Finn and the fight for robot rights. Now, those are certainly in the book, but The Mad Scientist’s Daughter is about Caterina Novak, Cat for short, growing, learning, changing, learning she’s changed in the wrong ways, and growing some more. It’s about love and loss and death and life and humanity. It has more in common with David Nicholls’ One Day than Asimov's I, Robot.

The book is divided into 3 parts, Cat’s childhood, young adult, and adult lives. When Cat is five, her father brings home a strange man whom Cat thinks is a ghost. He is, in fact, Finn, a mysterious android who her father adamantly did NOT create, but will be staying with them. Through Cat's childhood, she and Finn bond as he becomes her tutor and later her best friend. Cat’s parents, reclusive scientists, fear she’s becoming too close to Finn and needs more human companionship. They are right.

For a book that deals with a lot of ethical questions regarding humanity and servitude, it really does gloss over the complete inappropriateness of a girl falling in love with an authority figure she’s known since she was five. From puberty until her late thirties, Cat lusts after Finn and the feelings are returned. It makes the first sex scene pretty icky, particularly due to Cat’s emotional state at the time. That’s not to say their love wasn’t sweet or hot, but there’s always an undercurrent of inappropriateness that no one but Cat’s mom comments on.

Cat undergoes a lot of trauma over the years and it doesn’t make her a very nice person. She is selfish, unhappy, and deeply flawed. Basically from high school until the last hundred pages, I didn’t like her at all. But, unlike many other books with unlikeable protagonists, I felt like her final redemption was well earned. She seemed to want to change, understand why she was wrong, and came to it in a believable way. I read the last section, her thirties, though a non stop wash of tears as every bad thing that can happen to a person came to pass. Even the ending is heart-breakingly bittersweet. Some parts do feel a little manipulative and, again, Finn and Cat’s last love scene has an icky undercurrent, but so much of the writing is beautiful, it’s easy to give the flaws a pass.

[Nicky · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I visited Angry Robot, Leah was adamant that I hurry up and read this book. I got approved for it on Netgalley, too. So of course I had to get round to reading it sometime soon! I'm not getting paid for this review, I just got the book on Netgalley (and ended up reading it from the library instead while I was at a loose end).

It's lovely. When I was younger I was obsessed with Isaac Asimov's The Positronic Man -- the novel-length version, not the short story in the collection called The Bicentennial Man. This story was a little bit like that, except instead of focusing on the android, it focuses on the girl who cares about him. There's a shorter time-frame going on here, and of course Cat and Finn fall in love, while there's never more than a suggestion of that with Little Miss and Andrew, but... I felt the similarities. I love the basic story, the idea of an android with sentience slowly learning more about himself, about the world, and falling in love...

It's also surprisingly(?) passionate for a book about falling in love with an android. The physicality is always there, and it's done well. Despite all the science fiction context, the story is about love and contact, and it really makes you feel that.

I'll be in a hurry to read everything else by Cassandra Rose Clarke now. The Mad Scientist's Daughter is sweet, bittersweet; the ending isn't perfect, this isn't some kind of fairytale. But it feels all the more real and immediate for that.

[Leo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was everything I could possibly have wanted to night from a book. Compelling characters, cool setting with the sci-fi, robots and loads of feelings, I very rarely cry because of books but this almost made me cry but that's okay because the book was amazing. It's part about robots but mainly about humanity I believe. Such a good story

[Shannon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was looking forward to reading this novel, described as "A tale of love, loss and robots", and wasn't really sure, when I started, just what kind of book it is. If we want to pick neat categories, it's more Speculative Fiction than Science Fiction (the sci-fi aspects, such as they are, are very much in the background, except for the android called Finn), a coming-of-age novel in which the main character doesn't really grow up and mature all that much. It has a strong start but very quickly makes you aware that the story just isn't really going anywhere. It's slow. It gets tedious. But worse: it oozes a depressing, fatalistic vibe (i.e. atmosphere) that meant it took me months to finish this, as it was so hard to get into it.

When Cat was just a child, living alone with her parents outside a small town somewhere in America in the not-too-distant future, an android came to live with her family. Looking like a young man and called Finn, Cat thinks at first that he's a ghost. Finn becomes her tutor and her friend, despite her mother's protests, and helps her father, a scientist, in his laboratory in the basement. People, mainly scientists, come from all over to check him out, as he's the first - and last - lifelike android anyone's ever seen.

As Cat grows up, she slowly falls in love with Finn. Even after going off to the city for university (as an Arts major), working as a "Vice Girl" (selling cigarettes at "Vice stands" by the highway) and then meeting - and agreeing to marry - a businessman called Richard, Cat remains in love with Finn. And not only does she love him, she acts on it too, and the pair begin a sexual affair they keep secret.

But as Cat settles into her marriage with Richard, she finds her life is no more full than before, and perhaps less so. But Finn has sold himself off to a company working on the moon, and what kind of future can they have, anyway, even with new laws being proposed to give androids like him the rights of a human? Cat has done everything society expects of her, but only Finn makes her feel alive. What is she prepared to sacrifice to achieve peace, and happiness?

As the main character, Cat is flawed, unlikeable and impossible to connect with. I've read other books where I've greatly enjoyed reading the stories of such characters; this definitely wasn't one of them. Part of the problem is that Cat is one cold fish. Towards the end of the novel, she recognises this in herself and wonders about it, but in the same numb bubble as the whole of the book is written. There's only so much of a character like Cat that you can read, and at nearly four hundred pages, this is way too long, and reads like an aimless, robotic narration. I kept wondering: Why? What is the author intending with this character? What is Clarke trying to say? Is she trying to say that Cat is android-like? Yet she's not. She's deeply selfish, another flaw that it takes her a long time to realise. Is she trying to say that Cat is flawed, human? Okay, but it doesn't go anywhere. Just what kind of novel is this, really? Bottom line is: a deeply unsatisfying one.

So much of this story bothered me. Cat goes through life in such a fugue, you wonder why she bothers to get up in the morning. Her relationship with Finn never really progressed beyond plain weird for me as the reader - it just wasn't written or handled well enough to provoke a thoughtful reaction or promote any particular ideas. I was left feeling largely untouched, when all I want from a novel, at the most basic, elemental level, is to connect emotionally with a character. The way Cat was written left no room to connect with her at all, or understand her. You don't have to like a main character, but part of the joy of reading a flawed or unlikeable character is the chance to see the world in new ways, to understand someone different from you, and realise just how universal and human some things are. Not liking Cat isn't the real issue, it's about her being written in such a way that you are repelled. She cast a fog of depression over me and I had to wonder how none of her friends ever noticed.

Finn is the only truly interesting part of the story, but he's not in it much, and the whole "I have my own personal sex toy who does what I ask and can go all night" thing is pretty off-putting. True, Cat does realise how selfish she is and - in a way - how much she was taking advantage of him, but only in an abstract way. We never really learn anything about robots or androids, or what's going on in this world. In terms of world-building, it's distinctly lacking. Likewise, in terms of human relationships, it's confusing at best. Take Cat's mother, for example. In the early chapters, before she dies relatively young, the mother is depicted in mostly negative terms. She never seems to get along with her daughter, they never have any poignant mother-daughter moments, she's anti-Finn (or anti having a robot in the house) and only ever appears to criticise, grumble or glower in the background. Yet when she dies, Cat goes into mourning overdrive. It didn't really make much sense, that Cat would be so full of grief for a woman who was only ever on the periphery of her life before, for whom she never demonstrated any love nor received any. But it is because of her mother - and what she knew her mother wanted her to do with her life - that she marries Richard. Basically, the establishment and development of Cat's character, for all that it's what the story is about, was thinly done in the early chapters. Those early chapters are a poor foundation for the rest of the book mostly because they don't do much in establishing this futuristic world, or Cat's character.

It makes you wonder just how much the whole thing is a weak premise for human-android sex. I enjoy romances and reading sex scenes, but not these. There was just something intrinsically, inherently (and ethically) wrong about them, that you didn't know where to look or what to think. The fact that I felt she was taking advantage speaks to the idea that the novel does present Finn as almost human, but to be honest I couldn't get past the basics of this novel to really understand or see any bigger ideas or issues the author intended to get at. Between the slow pace, the mechanical-like droning narration, and a main character who failed to come to life for me, there was little to enjoy and plenty to annoy.