Review: Partials by Dan Wells

Title: Partials

Author: Dan Wells

Publisher:  HarperCollins

Publication Date: 2.28.12

Pages: 472

Genre: SciFi

Series: Yes (Partials #1)

Source: ARC from publisher

Rating: B-

Summary (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 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 threaten to launch what’s left of humanity into 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 discover 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.

Review:

I had never heard of Partials before I was given a copy to review, so I knew next to nothing about it. I read the synopsis that you see above and was immediately intrigued. While SciFi novels are hit or miss for me, I couldn’t help but compare this to a show I absolutely adored, Dark Angel. That made me even more excited to read this.

Unfortunately that was as excited as I was going to get.

I found that the story really dragged in places, and occasionally found myself skimming some pages to see when it would get better. The good parts (and yes, there were quite a few good parts) really propelled the storyline. When the action picked up, I was riveted. But then, a chapter or two later, the story would drag out again. I found these lags really soured the story for me.

I think my biggest problem was Kira. She was too bland of a main character for me. I never really connected with her, and so I had a hard time caring about her story. I don’t want to divulge too much because the actual story is fairly different from the summary. The summary provided barely skims the surface of what the novel really is about.

Overall, Partials is a good read. It’s not my favorite, but I would pick up the next book in this series to see what happened to the characters in this one. Dan Wells came up with a great idea for a novel … I just felt like it was poorly executed in places. Maybe I set my expectations too high for this one, but I would recommend checking this one out of the library before buying it unless you are a big-time SciFi fan.

Buy: Amazon