llamareads
Written on May 12, 2018
“The truth was they had trouble accepting my condition. It wasn’t about my safety, it was about their fear. Fear took away the Custodian position I’d been training years for. I wouldn’t let it ruin our chances at survival. I was more than my illness. Why didn’t they see that? Why weren’t they…proud of me for what I’ve accomplished?
Why don’t you see me? I wanted to ask, but I never did.”
I haven’t read a YA dystopian book in a while, so this was a delightful treat. I especially liked that the human settlements are actually inside the Interspace – a giant computer – so the areas they have to traverse are filled with circuit towers and other computer innards. I loved how character-focused it was, as well. The majority of it is a road trip sort of story with Sol and Echo trying to find the Interspace’s control center, so they both have a lot of time to get to know each other and bond. Since Echo isn’t initially very talkative, it also gives Sol a lot of time to ruminate over her epilepsy and how it’s changed how she’s viewed in the settlement, especially by her parents, and how she’s changed in reaction. One of my favorite parts about YA is watching characters struggle to figure out who they are, and while I think Echo has the most obvious growth, Sol grows a lot as well. There’s also a slow burn romance between the two, which was adorably sweet.
“Not a machine. He’d said that a few times. I hadn’t known him long but he didn’t seem the type to repeat himself. The differentiation mattered deeply to him then. With regret, I thought of how many times I’d called him a robot. His impassive manner made it seem like nothing bothered him, but maybe that was wrong. He was different in ways I didn’t fully understand, but different didn’t mean less. It was just another way to be. You’d think after all I’d been through in the last year I’d have the concept down.”
As for cons, the pacing was a bit uneven, and there’s a plot element towards the end (involving the source of Sol’s dreams) that was ridiculously deus ex machina. Basically, there’s a lab full of clones of the original scientists who created the Interspace who save them from the big bad guy after they’re pretty much all the way dead. The scientists also have a magical teleportation thingamajig that can send Echo and Sol directly to the Interspace’s control center. It just seemed to be a way to wrap up some unanswered questions quickly before the end of the book.
Overall, though, I very much enjoyed this book, and I’ve already found something else in Ms. Deen’s backlist to read!
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.