Published By: Curiosity Quills Press on April 4, 2016
Format Read: Kindle Edition
Genre: New Adult/ Dystopia/ Sci-fi
Series: Book One of The Kepler Chronicles
Source: Author Request
Rating: THREE STARS
~Amazon~
She struggles to feel human.
In
2256, the only remnants of civilization on Earth’s first colonized
planet, Kepler, are the plant-covered buildings and the nocturnal,
genetically spliced bug-people nesting within them: the Cull. During the
day, Syl leaves her home in the sewers beneath Elite City to scavenge
for food, but at night the Cull come looking for a meal of their own.
Syl thought gene splicing died with the Android War a century ago. She
thought the bugs could be exterminated, Elite city rebuilt, and the
population replenished. She’s wrong.
Whoever engineered the Cull
isn’t done playing God. Syl is abducted and tortured in horrific
experiments which result in her own DNA being spliced, slowly turning
her into one of the bugs. Now she must find a cure and stop the person
responsible before every remaining man, woman, and child on Kepler is
transformed into the abomination they fear.
He struggles not to.
For
Bastion, being an android in the sex industry isn’t so bad. Clubbing
beneath the streets of New Elite by day and seducing the rich by night
isn’t an altogether undesirable occupation. But every day a new android
cadaver appears in the slum gutters, and each caved in metal skull and
heap of mangled wires whittles away at him.
Glitches—androids
with empathy—are being murdered, their models discontinued and strung up
as a warning. Show emotion, you die. Good thing Bastion can keep a
secret, or he would be the next body lining the street.
He can
almost live with hiding his emotions. That is, until a girl shows up in
the slums—a human girl, who claims she was an experiment. And in New
Elite, being a human is even worse than being a Glitch. Now Bastion must
help the girl escape before he becomes victim to his too-human
emotions, one way or another.
REVIEW:
This book had a well paced plot, and action scenes that I enjoyed. However the lack of character development, made it hard to stay engaged while reading. Syl is a bad ass who is determined to do what she can for what's left of the human race. Bastion is a charming android who's sympathy for Syl leads him to fight against fellow androids for the greater good. Together they make a great team, but there wasn't enough character development for either of them. The future on this world was described well, but still left some details out.
"Modern science can change the genetic makeup of a person, but it can't give me more time. No, nothing so helpful as that."
There are lots of imaginative sci-fi elements in this book. The androids mimic humans despite their hatred of them, and have personality quirks of their own. The hover cars, plasma cannons, genetic experiments and menacing super androids made this plot driven book enjoyable. Syl has to grapple with loss over and over again. Her adventures and decisions were sometimes surprising, but always well described. The Glitches were mercilessly targeted and killed by their fellow androids, I wanted more of an explanation about how they were found out.
This was a New Adult book, so there was some adult content, and well placed profanity. The book goes back and forth between Bastion and Syl's point of view, but neither provides much back story. I wanted to care more about Bastion and Syl as 'beings,' but never found the reasons too. I didn't enjoy the ending, because it left important questions unanswered. But since this is a series those questions may be answered in future books. This book had so much potential I'm sure future books in the series will be better. I would recommend this for readers who enjoy plot driven, sci-fi books.
I received this e-book from the author in exchange for an honest review.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jadah McCoy currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee where she works as a legal coordinator. Artificial is her debut novel.
