Tuesday, September 4, 2012

ARC SPOT: What's Left Of Me


What’s Left Of Me
The Hybrid Chronicles
Kat Zhang
Releases 9.18.2012
HarperCollins
ISBN: 9780062114877

Pre-Order:  BN  /  AMAZON  /  POWELLS


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Our Thought's On:

                Imagine a world in which at birth two souls inhabit one body, and by the time the body is ten years of age only one soul will survive, and you have the world in What’s Left Of Me. With two complete persons competing for one body all throughout childhood America has changed, and in this day only one person may survive to be a legal citizen in society. The borders are closed and the history books repeat the tales of a horrific Hybrid War where there was immense death and destruction by the hands of the, basically normal, hybrids which are people with both souls intact. With a fear of hybrids keeping the population in rein, America forces its citizens to be only singularly souled, to choose, to repress a part of themselves until there is only on left even when the rest of the world chooses to be dual souled.  The control the government places upon the people may soon to be uncovered as even more horrific than previously thought, what if there was the ability to control which soul inhabited your body forever. What if it was more sinister than even that, and your vaccinations could even hold to key to the destruction of part of yourself?

                The world building and characters in What’s Left Of Me pull the reader into a new future where once we were two, but society only wants one. If you started life as being two being, two individual halves of a whole person, but to live in your home you have to basically kill a part of you to survive to the standards of the government. Addie and Eva are growing up together and have been on a government watch list for years since they had not “settled”, or become only one soul by the time they were twelve. Addie is the main controller of the pair, and Eva has been repressed back until she is little more than a voice in her sister’s mind. What is amazingly complex in the book is that as a child, both souls are embraced in society and family, schools teach both children in the one body but as a child reaches around 7, then there comes a time when really only one child can remain, and that lost soul is basically forgotten and not talked about anymore. You can see in the book where characters are interacting with children who are slipping through both personalities, both souls even in one conversation, and the thought that these two people must be forced to choose within that one body while still a child is quite devastating. Then the thought of what if the government or the family could actually make the choice of which soul to keep, which child to end, is even more tragic.

                Addie and Eva are struggling to stay under the radar in life but when they meet up and make friends with two kids at school, their futures will all change forever. The threat of hybrids is running rampant in America at the time that Addie and Eva are picked up and questioned by the government they soon find that they may never escape the institution that could be their grave. Hybrids are something to be contained, to disappear from the general population at the will of those in charge and Addie and Eva are uncovering a truth so deep and darkly devastating that the urge to escape and warn America runs through them, and soon they may find that they are not alone in wanting to uncover the truth about hybridization in America.

                Get ready for a whole new reality in the futuristic mindscape of What’s Left Of Me, leaving one questioning what is left of them when they lose a vital piece of themselves for the price for the price of their place in the world. Could you kill a piece of yourself, your sister or your brother, just because someone is telling you that it is required, or you must be taken away and never seen again in some institution. What experiments are occurring within our midst to complete this transformation for our country at the cost of our children and our future. The world gets darker by the minute in the dystopian thriller by debut writer Kat Zhang, showing us that people are more than they appear to be and the cost for success may be too high of a price to pay.

Blurb From The Publisher:

Eva and Addie started out the same way as everyone else—two souls woven together in one body, taking turns controlling their movements as they learned how to walk, how to sing, how to dance. But as they grew, so did the worried whispers. Why aren’t they settling? Why isn’t one of them fading? The doctors ran tests, the neighbors shied away, and their parents begged for more time. Finally Addie was pronounced healthy and Eva was declared gone. Except, she wasn’t…
For the past three years, Eva has clung to the remnants of her life. Only Addie knows she’s still there, trapped inside their body. Then one day, they discover there may be a way for Eva to move again. The risks are unimaginable–hybrids are considered a threat to society, so if they are caught, Addie and Eva will be locked away with the others. And yet…for a chance to smile, to twirl, to speak, Eva will do anything.


*received a copy of this book through edelweiss and the publishers on the amazing internet.  An honest review was typed out by me with at least three cups of coffee in my system and I hope all errors were auto-corrected or fixed by flying monkeys in residence.


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