Partials (Partials Sequence, #1)

by Dan Wells

[Angie]

Partials was a thrilling, action packed, and awesome journey! 99.996% of humanity has been killed by a virus known as RM. They all believe a group of lab created humans, known as Partials, released the virus in order to win a war. Eleven years later, there's still no cure, and no one has seen a Partial. Kira is an intern in the maternity ward and she's sick of seeing babies die every single day, so she devices a plan. She's going to track down a Partial and study its blood and tissues to find the cure. But her research leads her to so much more than she was anticipating or could even fathom.

Partials gets off to a slow start, but I didn't find myself bored. I was immediately immersed in this screwed up future. There is no way in heck I'd want to live here, where I'd be forced to get pregnant as often as possible in hopes of having a baby who was immune to RM. No way! Humanity is desperate, since there's less than 40,000 of them left, so the government has essentially hijacked women's bodies to be breeding factories. The slow development of the world did frustrate me at times, because it brought up a lot of questions. Some things seemed like glaring plot holes, but really, we just didn't get all of the information until later. However, once information starts rolling it, it's nonstop until the end!

What I loved most about Partials was its focus on science! There's a lot of sciencey goodness, especially in the middle when Kira is doing her research. I only have a basic understanding of genetics, but I still really enjoyed all of her notes on the structure of the virus and its development. Dystopian settings based on some kind of virus or natural disaster are my favorite kind, and this one was especially well developed, even if it came in chunks. Nothing is what it seems and there's an awesome twist that I never saw coming! Although when I thought back on previous details, it all made sense! I love when that happens!

Something else that I think sets Partials apart from other books in the genre, and YA in general, is that there's not a lot of focus on romance and there's no love triangle. Kira is already in a relationship with Marcus when the book starts. He's pushing for a stronger commitment, but Kira is focused on creating a better future which does cause some tension between them. I was fully expecting something to happen between her and the Partial she captures, but nope. There is undeniably some connection between them, but what that will turn into isn't clear. I'm hoping that it stays platonic, but we'll see.

I really enjoyed Partials. It has a detailed world and well-rounded characters. It's action packed and exciting, and I was never bored, even when there's a lull in the action. The only thing that really bothered me, other than the slow reveal of information, was the fact that no one knows anything about the Partials even though they were created by humans. In all of those database searches Kira did, shouldn't she have come across at least some basic biological information about them? Unless this is one of those things that has yet to be revealed...

Read more of my reviews at Pinkindle Reads & Reviews.