[Review] Partials by Dan Wells

The year is 2076 and the human race is going extinct. 
Partials were engineered as weapons to help win the Isolation War.  Partials look just like humans, but they’re machines - faster and stronger than humans. They won the war easily and five years later they turned against the human race. They released a virus into the air and killed 99% of the world’s population. Now, the average lifespan of a human child is fifty-six hours and the youngest human on the planet is fourteen- years-old.  The survivors in North America have huddled together on Long Island with a newly created government and civilization. In an effort to maximize their chances of giving birth to a new generation of humans with a resistance to the virus, the Hope Act was passed, requiring all women of a certain age to get pregnant as soon as possible, and to be pregnant as often as possible.

Kira is sixteen-years-old. She just started her internship as a medic and has already seen at least ten babies die. When her best friend gets pregnant, Kira makes up her mind to do what doctors and researchers haven’t been able to do in the past decade – cure the virus.

Even though Kira is a teenager, Partials doesn’t read like it’s written from the point of view of a teenager. I guess growing up in the kind of world that Dan Wells has created will make anyone mature quickly.  Kira is smart and extremely determined; that kind of determination puts Kira in dangerous situations.  When you couple that with a race against time, Partials becomes a fast-paced and thrilling novel that’s difficult to put down.  Romance?  Kind of.  But it’s more action and plot than romance, making this a good novel for the guys as well.  There are, however, moments where the pace of the story really slows down. For instance, when Kira is researching the virus, her thought process sometimes gets a little tedious. But then a high-stakes moment comes along that revs up the pace once again.   

Dan Wells created a world that is so rich with detail and so terrifyingly plausible – I’m reminded why I love post-apocalyptic novels. There’s not a major cliffhanger but there is a twist that is revealed near the end that sets the reader up for the next installment – Fragments (Partials #2), which is expected for publication in 2013.

eBook provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.