Partials

Partials By: Dan Wells
The human race is all but extinct after a war with Partials--engineered organic beings identical to humans--has decimated the population. Reduced to only tens of thousands by RM, a weaponized virus to which only a fraction of humanity is immune, the survivors in North America have huddled together on Long Island while the Partials have mysteriously retreated. The threat of the Partials is still imminent, but, worse, no baby has been born immune to RM in more than a decade. Our time is running out. Kira, a sixteen-year-old medic-in-training, is on the front lines of this battle, seeing RM ravage the community while mandatory pregnancy laws have pushed what's left of humanity to the brink of civil war, and she's not content to stand by and watch. But as she makes a desperate decision to save the last of her race, she will find that the survival of humans and Partials alike rests in her attempts to uncover the connections between them--connections that humanity has forgotten, or perhaps never even knew were there.
This book looks awesome, right? The cover, the description. Awesome. I'm really happy I read Partials. It was a lot like The Terminator, only there was also a disease and no time traveling. The surviving members of the war with the partials are living on Long Island, surviving only because the partials decided to leave them alone. Even though RM didn't kill the surviving humans, it has made them unable to have kids. Every newborn dies within days, making the extinction of the human race seem inevitable.  Does it seem like I'm giving out spoilers? I'm not. You learn the majority of this in the first chapter or so.  This story contains a lot of interesting ideas. I just got frustrated, because Dan Wells spelled everything out as if the readers were idiots. You learn everything that's going on in the world when Kira and her friends sit in a circle and just talk and talk and talk about it. It seems extremely pointless, as they're all a bunch of teenagers with no actual power. It's like how during the presidential election, everyone suddenly thinks they know everything about politics. Kira and her friends were those people. Half of them are soldiers, half medics. But they think they know everything. They're huge conspiracy theorists, and I just wanted to tell them (Especially Haru. Gosh I hated him) to kindly shut the hell up. I'm not saying the conspiracies were or were not right. I'll let you figure that out for yourself. I'm just saying they had no actual basis for anything they were talking about. They jumped the gun constantly, especially when soldiers questioned her adoptive mother, Nandita, about where she travels when she leaves long island. "That's none of your buisness," said Kira... "You think you can just barge into someone's front yard and ask anything you want? What if she went somewhere you don't like -- are you going to arrest her?" "Nobody is talking about arrest," said the soldier. "We're just asking questions. Calm down." "Just asking questions," said Kira. "Well, what if she refuses to answer?" (starting on page 99)  And then the soldiers tell her off, saying they're just doing their jobs trying to protect the city, which is more important than "wasting" her time. Kira responds vulgarly, which made me cover my face in embarrassment.  I'm pretty sure if one of my friends ever did something so obnoxious next to me, I would die of humiliation. To be fair, Nandita tells her she was wrong as well, and Kira admits she probably overreacted. But it's just a great example of how Kira and her friends jump to conclusions about things with no actual knowledge. It was extremely frustrating. There's something else that I'm not quite sure I love or hate. Dan Wells is not afraid to kill people off. In fact, I don't remember the last time I read a book where so many characters died. This was cool, because I think there are times when a character should die. You read a book and just think, "yeah right, like they would have survived that". I mean, would Lord of the Rings have been so good if Boromir had lived? Maybe. But I like to think it was necessary for certain character and plot development. I just hated how the characters died so easily. I mean, it was no big deal. So-and-so died, whatever, move on. I was somewhat annoyed with it during the first few deaths, but when Wells killed off the only character I truly liked, as if it was nothing, I was beyond frustrated. When a main character dies, it's supposed to be a big deal. People are supposed to be pissed when that happens. They should be crippled in grief. They should fight back as their hearts broke. Whatever. They should not shrug it off. Even if you know they died for a good cause, it's still supposed to matter! Yet even with these complaints, I still thought the book was pretty good. I still went looking for Fragments, the sequel, right away. I'm insanely curious about certain things, and want the answers a.s.a.p. I definitely recommend it.