{A Kelly M Review} Partials by Dan Wells

Title: Partials
Series: Partials #1
Author: Dan Wells
Genre: YA Dystopian
Publisher: Blazer and Bray (U.S), HaperCollins (U.K)

Synopsis:

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.

I came across this book through my friend Mariam on Starbooks trying to force this book on to everyone. I trust her judgement so I went to go buy it, but for some reason I just couldn’t get myself to read it. So there it sat on my book shelf for a while. Then one day I decided let’s just get this over with. Let’s just say I wanted to kick myself in the face repeatedly with a steel-toed boot for not reading it sooner.

It starts off quite a bit morbid, with the death of another newborn baby. In this new America, humans cannot reproduce anymore because of RM. It was a virus that was released after the Isolation War that was fought for the humans by the Partials (these are genetically engineered human looking machine type robot things. We do not really find out what they are exactly, that comes in the second book I hope), that wiped out nearly the entire human race. Now what is left of human kind is dying out and they believe the Partials are the creators of this virus. Who is believed as the youngest person on earth just turned fourteen and babies are still not surviving. The government starts panicking and lowers the age of conceiving to sixteen (O_O) and this is where the story starts getting a lot of oomf!

Kira, who is sixteen, is not ready to have a baby and watch it die and she doesn’t want any of her friends to go through it either. She then decides to do everything she can to find a cure. When she tells her friends about her plan she finds out her best friend Madison is pregnant and she is determined to do everything she possibly can to help that baby survive. She believes studying a Partial will help her find the missing piece to the puzzle and since the government refused her request she puts together an illegal team and goes capture one herself.

This is why I loved Kira so much. She will do everything she can do to the right thing. She would rather save the human race than just enjoy time with her boyfriend Marcus. This for me was awesome. So if you are looking for good actiony stories with a nice romance thrown in you are so not gonna get it in this book. It is such a nice change. This is why I do not like her pansy ass boyfriend. He wants her to forget about saving something that can’t be saved ( punch-him-in-the-face moment right? ) and just enjoy the time they have left and have his baby. So there I sat thinking, could you be anymore moronic? How can she have your baby if none of them survive??? So Kira does what any awesome girl should do, she left his ass behind and went to do the right thing.

She gets a Partial in the end, his name is Samm and I love him. I am so Team Sam in this case, if there is romance in the next book I’m just gonna lay Samm down in front of her wrapped in a bow and say: “I approve of this union, make the right choice.” Did I mention I love Samm?

Anyway, that is basically the beginning of the story. Dan Wells is an amazing writer and kept me completely hooked since the first page. I actually forgot to eat and I finished it in a solid six hours. It is a definite must read, one of my top dystopian novels of the year.