Partials (Partials Sequence, #1) in Nothing But Reading Challenges

Feb 13, 2015 Morgan rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, young-adult, kindle-read, geek-appeal, sci-fi, post-apocalyptic-dystopic-utopia

I really, really, really expected to like this more than I did.

But there were some things that just kept bringing it down for me.

ISSUE #1 - 99.96% of the population of the United States is dead due to a virus. The remaining 0.04% all manage to find their way to Long Island. The few who don't live specifically in that one place are nearby on farms that supply it. HOW DID THEY ALL GET THERE? Every person pretty much has a story of how they were the only one who survived in their town. Some of them I really, really, really expected to like this more than I did.

But there were some things that just kept bringing it down for me.

ISSUE #1 - 99.96% of the population of the United States is dead due to a virus. The remaining 0.04% all manage to find their way to Long Island. The few who don't live specifically in that one place are nearby on farms that supply it. HOW DID THEY ALL GET THERE? Every person pretty much has a story of how they were the only one who survived in their town. Some of them were 5 or younger when it happened. They walked until they found people? Really? It sounds like everything went down, so why wouldn't you have scattered groups? Without communication and transportation? With danger lurking and everyone dead? I don't buy it. It isn't explained here and it really should have been if there's an actual reason for it.

ISSUE #2 - The Hope Act making every female from the age of 18 up get pregnant every year until menopause? (And very early it's introduced that there is talk of lowering it to 16 year olds...) I get the "take a run at the statistics" and hope that 0.04% of the babies are immune to the virus too, but 11 years in of this bullshit and you still haven't had a newborn live beyond ~50 hours? Not a single one? IN ELEVEN YEARS? WITH EVERY WOMAN OF CHILDBEARING YEARS PREGNANT ON A YEARLY BASIS? AND YOU APPARENTLY HAVE TOP SCIENTISTS/DOCTORS WHO HAVE SURVIVED AND SHOULD KNOW BETTER? Come on.

Not to mention this is not a healthy thing AT ALL for the entire female population. Mentally or physically. This is not limited to women in relationships or consensual situations. This is MANDATORY. You either find someone to knock you up or get artificially inseminated WITHIN TWO MONTHS OF YOUR BIRTHDAY... Or...~*~consequences~*~? No idea. That wasn't spelled out. Nor was it spelled out what happened with infertility or women who are unable to conceive for whatever reasons. There was talk of other things having been eliminated in utero a long time before that, but there are a good deal of factors that can't be pre-determined in that fashion. Are we just hand-waving that along with the HOW EVERYONE ENDED UP ON LONG ISLAND? The logic is just really faulty.

:|

Also, this being a huge theme running through the book and a source of conflict among the remaining humans... It's given surprisingly little attention emotionally? Yet another thing I feel suffered from the fact that it's written from a male perspective. (Though some men can, it's not the case here.)

ISSUE #3 - Male writer creating a female PoV story without a female PoV. Oh, Kira is a girl and she does things, but it's all very FLAT. There's not really much emotion behind anything in the story. The whole every woman pregnant, every year, giving birth over and over and over and over to babies that die soon after birth or within about 3 days... This would have hit a boiling point with people FAR before 11 years. It also would have hit more of one than it does in the book...which is basically not really at all. Of course, this is true of all the characters. They all just seem really flat. I don't know how else to describe it. :|

ISSUE #4 - The science was really indepth and good in some places, but really shoddy in others. Also a lot of the scifi bits with "cool new tech that they still somehow have" are just glossed over like it's talking about Kira using a tissue. Though there's not an awful lot of new tech that's talked about.

On the plus side...

Science.
PoC main character who could be great if she were fleshed out more and didn't feel like a cardboard cut-out of a MC. (Of course all the characters felt like cardboard cut-outs to me.)
The Partials.

I don't think I'll be continuing on with this one, but I might ask friends that do for a quick synopsis on what happens. ...more

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Sep 01, 2012 Vicky rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: dystopia, series-stalled-or-abandoned, setting-united-states-ne, zz-cover-color-brown, z-author-american-usa

I was stuck about 1/3 of the way through the book for the longest time. I finally decided to pick it up last night to plod through and ended up finishing it at 5am this morning.

It's a bit on the unrealistic side - a group of 16 year-old kids staging the covert missions and breakouts that occur in the book just doesn't seem feasible. Sure a few of them are militarily trained, but it a highly militaristic post-apocalyptic town ... c'mon.

The book, it seemed to me, was a lot of build up for the nex ...more

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