Review: Partials by Dan Wells

Goodreads Summary:
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.

Release Date: February 28, 2012
Series? Partials Sequence #1
Pages: 468 (Hardcover)
Publisher: Balzer + Bray

LONG STORY SHORT:

This book might not be a WOW for everyone, but I can almost guarantee that you are going to like it. For me, at least It's my new favorite of the year - that's how much it drew me in with all that talk about past, present and future and which is more important and about love and friendship and finding yourself and your own opinion of things and MAN - surprises, surprises! And SO unique! Really, skip my review if you need to to get the book faster. I won't mind. Just - please - read Partials.

REVIEW:

It's always the quiet waters that are deep. It's always those books that you dread and put off and don't really expect anything from that make your head spin, and you hold your breath and you cannot think of anything but this one novel. Partials is like that.

I don't even know where to start. The characters, maybe? Because they were so real. They all had their very own story and you could see how that story formed their opinions and views and thoughts and how it affected their reactions. This is a book where "fleshed out" is the only word that makes sense when it comes to character evaluation. As if that wasn't enough the main character Kira did not lack in sympathy at all. I could relate to her in a lot of ways but even when I couldn't her actions seemed reasonable to me. Oh, and Marcus? Most funny, loveable, most awesome love interest in a long time. That's the boyfriend I've always dreamed of!

The plot itself? Or should I rather say, the action? Because honestly it was nothing but. If you are like me and you love when a book always switches between kick-ass action and the planning process of said action Partials is for you. It's not like when three hundred pages of the novel are slow development of the threat or problem and then the next fifty are the fight and the last fifty are the happy ending. Oh, no. You see the problem and the despair in the beginning and you don't see the way out but just like Kira you want to find solutions and you see her risking everything again and again throughout the entire story and there are still those huge, suspense-loaded scenes in the end.

Lastly, there is the nonexistent cliffhanger. I didn't even know Partials was part of a series until the very end and the book had a perfect conclusion, so that you wouldn't even need a sequel. Anyway, the last three pages give a pretty good outlook on how the next book WILL go on.

One negative thing might be all the complicated explanations on RM and the Partials that I sometimes just didn't understand and I have to admit I might have skimmed some of them but it didn't affect my liking the book at all, so it's not even a real negative thing.

All in all, Partials is a must read that - in my opinion - deserves much more attention than it got.