Threadbare

I’m not sure where to begin with this book…

The description of the novel calls to attention, “a cybernetic soldier wanted was to be human, but then she fell in love… are robots even capable of love?” Just in that, I think you can see the lack of plot logic in the novel.

Vick is introduced as a cyborg soldier. Once human, her brain and parts of her body were replaced with robotic parts because she was a very valuable, young soldier for this mercenary group referred to as the Storm. 63% of her brain is robotic, the other 37% is still human and she is supposed to struggle with knowing whether she is a human or a machine for a majority of the book. She also doesn’t have any memories of a past and, over time, the memories fade back.

The first place this fell apart for me was the lack of logic in the accident regarding Vick’s change. She was doing a training exercise that was designed to be a stress test. Yet, when she and two others were placed into an airlock for a non-combat exercise, they had fully loaded, battle-ready rifles for some reason. Maybe they’d carry gear or exercises to be used to carrying their gear, but in no way do elite soldiers carry fully-loaded, war-ready weapons into battle. Of course, this battle-ready weapon was the reason for her brain damage. During the exercise, the airlock got stuck. Someone stuck in the room with her was claustrophobic and drew his gun to shoot the lock in a panic. He and another man died while Vick got brain damage. This situation just never would have happened if the Storm was as elite a merc organization as it claims to be… and the rest of the plot logic is not much better.

After the accident which results in most of Vick’s brain being replaced with a computer, she is given an emotional support human / psychic empath, Kelly, to help her regulate her emotions because the surgery has caused her to build emotions to a point where they’re unstable due to her inability to express them regularly. This is where the crux of ‘am I human or a machine’ really breaks down.

By virtue of her having an overabundance of emotions, she is clearly not a machine. For almost the entirety of the book, she has an abundance of emotions and no ability to control them to the point she overloads and passes out a couple of times. If she truly was a robot, then the struggle for her to regain humanity would be for her to connect with her emotions – and that would have been an interesting story – the empath, working with someone who had parts of their brain removed (on purpose even) working toward bringing the human back to the machine. Then say, Vick, the emotionless machine did start feeling again, but she had to hide it so the doctor who wanted super soldiers wouldn’t know. That would have resulted in a similar ending where Vick had to prove she was a robot and not human in order to resolve Kelly of her unethical behavior court hearing.

Though the novel starts out with action, this is not an action novel. For about 2/3 of it, it focuses mainly on emotion, relationship, and flashbacks, only to suddenly get back to a mission randomly. Chapters 23 and 24 show the main characters fighting with each other over a misunderstood flirtation, then falling asleep and chapter 25 starts out with the team of characters in a downward spiral on a spaceship. The cut was jarring and wasn’t cohesive with the previous chapters, it felt like the story just remembered there was a bad guy still on the loose that needed to be caught…

The last ten chapters of the novel felt like they weren’t necessary and were part of some other drama entirely. I get how they tie into the book with Kelly having put an emotional block in Vick’s head and so now Kelly was being tried for putting that block in her head, but it felt so obscure for them to deal with the ‘sadistic, evil’ kidnappers who had a long reputation so much faster than the last 10 chapters that sped through a random court hearing that didn’t have much… meat to it. I’m still kind of confused how you could make the argument that Vick is not human if she had an emotional block on her, period. This is the crux of the argument for Kelly’s unethical behavior. As an emotional psychic, she is not permitted to block someone’s ability to feel certain things. However, they argue Vick is a robot, and thus, blocking emotions was part of making her work more efficient and thus, it wasn’t unethical.

Yet… emotions are specifically a human thing. If you can psychically block emotions, that alone, by virtue, would prove someone’s humanity…

A lot happens in this book while at the same time, nothing happens. There are a lot of parts that don’t feel connected, they’re just sort of, ‘we’re doing this now. And we’re doing this now. And we’re doing this now,’ which then fails to build the tension and destroys any chance an overall building action.

Getting away from the plot, so much of the narration wasn’t necessary. There was so much internal monologuing used to explain every little intention, every little thought, every little word said, and how you should take it that it was redundant. Sometimes it felt like the author was not sure about just letting dialogue roll back and forth because so much of it is interrupted with random asides, sometimes even inserting random thoughts to something unrelated like remembering what Asheville is like and then getting back into a deep, dark discussion with the doctor. This destroyed a lot of tension that could’ve been there when the characters were talking, but… with no ability to just let the characters interact or for the reader to interpret intentions, the characters were only ever allowed to be seen as morally correct or incorrect based on whether the narrator was telling you they were good or bad. No interpretations, no reading the signs…

Overall, the characters were flat. Vick was excessively good at everything, literally everything. Best soldier at 18. Destroyed everything. Then you learn about her before she joined the army and she played sports, instruments, sang, karate, any hobby you imagine? She did it and head medals for how good she was. She was a better pilot than the team pilot. She eventually was also so OP, she just got into computers and shut electronics down with her mind. It would’ve been a cool evolution for her if she wasn’t already so OP. The bad guys of this book fell into the trope of ‘allergic reaction’ wherein they are over the top dastardly immediately to every little thing, sneering at the good guys. You know who is ‘good’ and who is ‘bad’ by who sneers when they’re talking to someone… and then every male character in this book was either evil, useless, a love interest, or a combination of that. Compulsive sleazy guys were the default for this author’s POV of like, every male character. There was a scene, chapter break here, Kelly’s in jail, and as she’s sitting in jail, some random drunk is walked by just at the top of her chapter because why not, and he has to leer at her. Sometimes… you just don’t need to. There was just so much of it… if a guy was in a scene, you expect a sleaze. That also includes when Vick, Kelly, and their team went on their final mission. After Vick is sexually assaulted (and bleeding profusely), she’s walking around with a torn shirt, and even her teammates, knowing she is abused, knowing they’re in the middle of a mission, knowing she’s in pain, still check her out when she’s walking by because, ‘LMFAO, dudes obsessed with tits and staring at women.’

A couple of times is fine. It happens. But just about every male character being evil or sleazy except for the judge and the lawyer at the end who were both just props anyway? Really? For something super focused on empathy to others, this book read as … not empathetic at all. It was obvious the author loved her main characters though.

And I still don’t understand why she became suicidal when she was reprimanded by her father. Their relationship was never explored because she couldn’t remember him, but that’s an intense reaction to have to someone who said, “I’m disappointed in you.” There was literally no punishment to her for her disobedience, but she flew into a suicidal whirr because of disappointment and that mood swing was never explored nor her relationship with her father that would cause her to become suicidal so suddenly.