Hullmetal Girls

by Emily Skrutskie

From the author of Bonds of Brass, don't miss Hullmetal Girls, which NPR calls "a little Ender's Game, a little Hunger Games, [and] a little Battlestar Gallactica."

Aisha Un-Haad would do anything for her family. When her brother contracts a plague, she knows her janitor's salary isn't enough to fund his treatment. So she volunteers to become a Scela, a mechanically enhanced soldier sworn to protect and serve the governing body of the Fleet, the collective of starships they call home. If Aisha can survive the harrowing modifications and earn an elite place in the Scela ranks, she may be able to save her brother.

Key Tanaka awakens in a Scela body with only hazy memories of her life before. She knows she's from the privileged end of the Fleet, but she has no recollection of why she chose to give up a life of luxury to become a hulking cyborg soldier. If she can make it through the training, she might have a shot at recovering her missing past.

In a unit of new recruits vying for top placement, Aisha's and Key's paths collide, and the two must learn to work together--a tall order for girls from opposite ends of the Fleet. But a rebellion is stirring, pitting those who yearn for independence from the Fleet against a government struggling to maintian unity.

With violence brewing and dark secrets surfacing, Aisha and Key find themselves questioning their loyalties. They will have to put aside their differences, though, if they want to keep humanity from tearing itself apart.

A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year
A Paste Best Book of the Year

“Filled with badass girls and epic adventures…this one's guaranteed to take you on a ride.”— Buzzfeed

"A captivating sci-fi adventure that will make you fall madly for Skrutskie's fabulous writing, if you haven't already. [Perfect] for fans of: Cindy Pon (Want) and Pierce Brown (Red Rising)."-- Paste

"A book you will devour in one sitting, Hullmetal Girls is not to be missed!"—Beth Revis, New York Times bestselling author of A World Without You and Across the Universe

"Hullmetal Girls has everything I love in a space opera: deep faith, high stakes, endless questions about humanity, and a cast that shows the best (and less-best) of what we might become." -E.K. Johnston, #1 New York Times bestselling author of That Inevitable Victorian Thing

★ "Unexpected and clever...A great science fiction story."--VOYA, Starred Review
 
"An engaging narrative with a complex cast that intersects race, sexual identity, religion, and class."--Kirkus Reviews

• ISBN10: 1524770191
• ISBN13: 9781524770198
• Publish Date: 17 July 2018
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Ballantine Books Inc.
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 320
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781524770198

Reviews

[llamareads]

Trigger warnings: characters forcibly outed, death of children, gaslighting, anti-religious sentiment

“An electric buzz settles into my skull, comforting and cradling, and I feel my heartbeat slow. This is right. This is what a Scela is meant to be. A living weapon, a replacement for the ancient guns that blew holes in the hulls of ships we lost so long ago that their names are no longer taught. We’re more elegant weapons. More civilized. Less clumsy or random. We’re built with the strength to hold this Fleet together.
For the first time in two weeks, I’m proud of what I am.”

It’s been 301 years since the Fleet left Earth to find a new planet. In that time, seven tiers of ships have emerged, originally divided by functions but now basically a caste system, with the First District holding the seat of government and the Seventh having Dickensian manufacturing ships, child labor and all. Naturally, with a system like that, you’re going to have some unhappy with the status quo: the Fractionists, who believe that separating the Fleet into smaller groups will help them find a habitable planet sooner. Lately, the Fractionists have gotten rowdier, and have led to a recruitment drive for the Scela, the surgically modified peacekeeping force for the Fleet. Out of dozens of applicants, only four survive the surgery, including our two teen protagonists: Key, a First District girl who has giant holes in her memory, the largest being why she decided to sign up, and Aisha, a Seventh District girl who signed up to buy a better life for her sister and ill brother. Things are not quite what they seem (are they ever?), and soon the fate of the Fleet is in their hands. Can they overcome their differences and work together?

“A grin breaks over my face, uncontrollably wide thanks to the augmentations. I can do this. I can command my body, be the perfect tool I was sculpted into, earn my place in the Scela ranks. I can carry the weight of the exo on my back—it’s nothing compared to what I’ve borne already.
I may not be a useful Scela yet. But I will be damned if I’m not a useful sister.”

One of the surprising – and enjoyable – part of the books is that the main focus is not on a romance, but on the friendship between the two teen girls. To start off with, the characters are a bit hard to like. Aisha is (understandably) so obsessed with her brother and sister that there’s not a lot else to her character. Key is a snotty snobby teen who basically thinks herself better than everyone else, especially the Fractionist hoi pollloi (the big reveal of who she actually is will probably not be a surprise to anyone).

The part that worked best for me was the bit of sci-fi horror mixed in. I feel like I’ve read a lot of scifi involving enhanced soldiers, but it seems like most of them can “pass” for normal humans. Scela soldiers, however, can’t be mistaken for anything else, even out of their mech armor, and part of the integration is a sort of AI mind that helps them control the new tech embedded in their bones. In addition, each team can be connected through an exosystem, which transmits some of their thoughts and strong feelings to the others. Through willpower, one of the team could seize control of the others, and, in fact, on missions the team is usually controlled by a higher level person’s orders. There were thought-provoking issues of consent here, one of the major ones being the characters’ sexuality. Aisha is aroace, Woojin is pan, Praava is trans hetero and Key has so many holes in her memory it’s just one thing she can’t remember. While these labels are mentioned, I didn’t really feel like they had any effect on the overall story, and the way in which they come out (the characters are forcibly outed due to the effects of the exosystem) left a bad taste in my mouth. As another issue of representation, Aisha follows the Muslim-esque Ledic religion. Before the Scela surgery, she wore a headscarf and regularly attended temple, and she still prays. One of the Ledic tenets is that they believe that through traveling they will earn a new home, and that God’s promised a planet for them. I’m not Muslim, so I can’t speak to how well most of it was handled, but several team members are dismissive of her beliefs, with Key being especially nasty.

As for the rest of the story, I liked several secondary characters (Aisha’s siblings, Zaire the dock worker, and Marshall Jesuit are the top of my list) and though I thought the plot was predictable, the pacing and overall tension were good. Overall, while I liked the book, I have concerns about some of the representation, so I’d probably give it 3.5 stars, rounding up to 4.

I received this book for free from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

[kalventure]

Read out the first chapter of Hullmetal Girls here!

"The Chancellor sees us the way humans do, the way I used to see Scela. We're tools. Weapons. Things to be wielded with force."

Hullmetal Girls is an ambitious science fiction novel that brings together many elements into an interesting (and frightening) future. The book gripped me with its first words, providing just enough of a primer of the world, the customs, and I had high hopes for this Battlestar Galactica mashup with cyborgs and a militaristic dystopian future. Unfortunately, this book fell short for me and didn't live up to my hopes.

It's been three hundred and one years since humanity left the solar system and took to space in search of a new planet to call home. They live in a fleet of ships that are all under Commander Vel's command and searching for a home together. Due to rising tensions from the Fractionists that want to see the fleet split up into smaller groups to search, Vel has requested a large recruitment drive for people to volunteer to become Scela, cyborgs in the General Body that are the military force of the fleet.

Hullmetal Girls is told in the alternating perspectives of new Sclea recruits Aisha Un-Haad and Key Tanaka, but there are also two secondary characters that are part of their "unit": Woojin Lin and Praava.

--We are introduced to Aisha as she is going in for her procedure to be made into a Scela (what they call cyborgs) and serve in the General Body. We are present for the painful operation of her taking the metal. She is from the backend of the fleet, the poorer areas, and has chosen this to help her siblings.
--We are introduced to Key as she wakes up from the procedure in recovery and discovers that she has no memory of her life prior to the operation. By her mannerisms and drive, she deduces that she is from the front of the fleet, privileged in ways that mean she wouldn't need to choose this life. Is she a true believer?

The characters all took to the metal for different reasons; however, we learn that Key doesn't remember those reasons or anything from her life before.

"Nothing left for me except my exo and this new purpose I found in the fragments of myself."

Much of the story is consumed by the conversion to Scela and their training, and I was left wondering what the plot of the book actually was. While there were hints to the political situation and the potential conspiracies, for me they were mired down by the Scela conversion and training. I don't read a lot of science fiction with cyborgs so this may be something typical of the genre that isn't to my personal preferences. I found myself bored and skimming after about 40% of the book, and it wasn't until conspiracies arose and motives were questioned that I got back into the story a bit.


I like a dual-POV story, especially with characters like Aisha and Key that obviously are from different situations and backgrounds; however, at times their inner monologues were very repetitive, adding to the feelings I had that the book was drawn out longer than necessary. I also found the character motivations a little blurred at times, shifting without reason as it suited the narrative. There are a number of occasions where Aisha or Key's position on a subject made a complete 180 with hardly any convincing or acknowledgement that they had changed their mind.

There are many elements explored in this tale: religion (Ledic) versus... I assume atheism, as the Ledic disdain was clear but there was not contrast opinion or explanation of why it fell out of favor; utilitarianism (greater good) and gray morality; class systems and prejudices based on where in the fleet you were born. This book has a diverse cast of characters, and there are characters which identify as aroace and pansexual; however, it is important to note the sexuality discussion was all of two sentences.

This is an ambitious tale of power, loyalty, and family set in space. I personally found the cyborg aspects (the conversion and training) to be the least compelling and wish that part of the story had been a bit shorter. There were breadcrumbs dropped in the early pages that come in to play much later, but I found the exploration and intrigue of the latter 40% of the book to be the most interesting and wish that they had been fleshed out more. Hullmetal Girls has a lot of elements being explored - religion, class systems, utilitarianism - but for me those components were overshadowed by the Scela narrative and left me wanting more. At its core, this is a story about the extent the government and its opposers will go for "the greater good," and how people get swept up into something they didn't sign up for.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher, Random House Children's / Delacorte Press, for providing me an e-arc of this book in exchange for my honest review.

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