Title: Partials
Author: Dan Wells
Series: Partials #1
Published: March 2012 by Harpercollins
Length: 482 pages
Warnings: violence,
sex references 13+
Source:Publisher
Other info: Dan
has also written the I Am Not a Serial Killer series. Book two in the Partials
series will be called Fragments, and should be published next year.
Summary : The
only hope for humanity isn’t human. In a world where people have been all
but wiped out by a virus created by part-human cyborgs called ‘Partials’, and
where no baby survives longer than three days, a teenage girl makes it her
mission to find a cure, and save her best friend’s unborn child. But
finding a cure means capturing a Partial...
Review: In this
world, most of the six billion humans are dead, killed off by a viorus. A few remain,
and live on Long Island. The youngest of them is fourteen and every baby is
dead by the time they’re three. Three days. Kira is sixteen, a medic in training
who is determined to find the cure for the virus, RM. She’s spurred on by the
fact that her best friend is preganant. She has nine months to find the cure. However,
they’ve exhausted almost every option. All she can think of turning to is a
Partial, a genetically engineered soldier that fought in a war a decade ago. But
to study one, she has to catch one.
I really enjoyed Dan’s other books, the I Am Not a Serial
Killer series. So I was hoping for good things from this one. From the first
page, the death of yet another newborn, I was drawn in. Very easily we get a
sense of Kira, her morals, and the way she thinks.
We soon understand the world that she’s living in. The last
band of humans all living together, without much hope, trying to get the human
race to survive longer than the current generation. I like the very dystopian
idea of the Hope Act- every woman over seventeen must get pregnant, as many
times as she can and as often as she can. Even if her babies all die.
The world building surrounding the War and the Partials wasn’t
that good. It took me a little while to understand them, what exactly they
were, what they really looked like, and so on. At first I thought that it was
meant to be something kept back, revealed later. But by halfway, I’d given up
on learning about them fully, and I never got to see that. Shame really.
Kira is a really strong character. She does everything in
her power and a couple of things out of it to ensure that she has all the
chance she can get to cure RM. Samm was interesting. He’s the Partial. His
reactions to everything at first were incredibly sweet, and the logic behind
his name is lovely. However, his loyalties towards the end of the book were
just really really confusing, what with everything going by so fast.
The pacing was great. Especially from about ¾ of the way
through and onwards. While for most of the book, I just wanted to carry on,
from then on, I couldn’t put it down. All the little strands were converging,
and I just had to see how it all played out.
The ending. Wow. Throughout the novel, I was thinking it
would be a great standalone novel. And then we learn a huge thing about Kira. And
I just had to know more.
Overall: Strength 4 tea to a fast, thrilling,
unputdownable book. Must get hold of the sequel. If there is one. There better
had be. ((After writing edit- There is!
Fragments! Yay!!))
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