Review ~ Partials by Dan Wells

Partials by Dan Wells

Rating:  4 of 5 stars
Genre: YA Science Fiction

Book Description from Goodreads:  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.

Dan Wells, acclaimed author of "I Am Not a Serial Killer," takes readers on a pulsepounding journey into a world where the very concept of what it means to be human is in question--one where our humanity is both our greatest liability and our only hope for survival

Whitney's Thoughts:  My 16-year-old son and I both enjoyed this book. Dan Wells has the rare ability to cover extremely disturbing subject matter without including sex or bad language--at all! The world he creates in Partials is fascinating to explore. In some ways, the few remaining humans on Long Island struggle to survive, growing their own food, using horses for transportation, and so on. In other ways, they’re surrounded by riches untold. One of Kira’s friends has a solar generator, which she charges up to listen to one of the 100 iPods she’s salvaged from houses whose occupants died in the plague. The adults in the book struggle with hopelessness, because they saw all of civilization crash down around them. But Wells shows that, for the “plague babies” like Kira and her friends, who were infants or toddlers  before the fall of civilization, this post-apocalyptic life is the new normal. As the young characters forge forward with hope and creativity, trying to figure out how their lives and the Partials’ are interwound, I found myself utterly immersed in a weird and grim, but very believable world.

My son noted that, recently in YA literature, high bodies counts are sometimes taking the place of high drama (**coughHungerGamescough**). Partials suffers a titch from this in the climax, and I got a little weary of people being shot.

But I’m looking forward to the sequel next February. 

~Whitney~