It seems to me that the first mistake made with this book was to target teenage girls. Here I come with my gender stereotyping and I'm sure there will be other female readers who'll love this book and disagree with me... but despite the protagonist being female and the cover featuring a teen girl, Dan Wells appears to have written a "boy book". The lengthy descriptions and idle conversations were dull enough without the subject matter going from hockey to guns to bombs.
In the words of Mr Presley: "a little less conversation, a little more action please". There was a serious lack of drama, suspense and tension in this book. I braved the first boring 200 pages because I was sure once the hunt for the Partials began we would see something a little more kickass, dangerous, pulse-pounding... something that would make me excited to read on. Unfortunately, I was wrong. This is another one of those books that will be just right for fans of slow, well-rounded plot development, but not one for people like me who prefer something a bit faster-paced and nastier.
This story is about a world where the human population has dwindled to approx. 40,000 because of a disastrous war with genetically engineered soldiers called Partials. The remaining few have congregated on an island, but all the babies born to the women die within a few days due to the release of a virus by the Partials. The adults, however, remain immune to this virus. Now the thing I find quite unbelievable is that we're expected to just accept that expert researchers have been studying the babies for years in search of a cure, and yet it takes a sixteen year old girl to come up the idea that they should also be looking at why adults have immunity to the virus. I mean... duh.
The biggest attempt to turn this into a book that could easily be marketed to teenage girls was the rather boring romance story. But I felt it was so flat and uninteresting that it only served to make things worse. This book is for someone, I'm sure, though I don't know who to recommend it to. Probably those who thought The Book of Blood and Shadow had good pacing.
