skip to main |
skip to sidebar
It isn't a far stretch to find a world that has been ravaged by the greed and hubris of humans. In Dan Wells' Partials series, the development of humanoid soldiers, the Partials, was just the beginning of the end. When the Partials rebelled against their creators, a war like no other ravaged the face of the planet, leaving humans and Partials alike desperately clinging to life. In Fragments, that fight gets even more desperate.
Kira's astonishing discovery that she isn't completely human was life-altering. She grew up fearing Partials only to find out she was some kind of Partial, but no one knew exactly what she was. She aged like a human, and didn't seem to have the same weaknesses of a Partial, but she certainly had the strength of a Partial. Kira was the one who realized the Partial pheromone was the key to inoculation against RM, the virus that kills all babies within days of birth and is effectively phasing out the human race. When she saves her friend's baby, the first child to survive since The Break, she realizes there is more to the story. With Samm, the first Partial who made her realize just how human the created beings were, and his Partial friend Heron, Kira takes off across the country to get to the heart of ParaGen's motives behind their current situation. The Partials are about to reach their expiration date, the twenty year mark when they will all degrade and die, and with them goes the cure for RM. They are in a race against time.
While Kira is off trying to save the world, Marcus is trying desperately to hold onto their little piece of the world. The humans on Long Island have seen a baby live, but without a cure to replicate, they have lost more baby since then. The Partial army is closing in on them and threaten an invasion with every bated breath. Marcus is worried about Kira off in the dangerous world, but he is more terrified Dr. Morgan will find her. Dr. Morgan, the crazy Partial doctor who thinks Kira holds the cure to the Partial expiration date and isn't afraid to experiment on her to find it, is ripping apart their world to find Kira. While she waits for Kira's arrival, she is using humans as her guinea pigs to find a cure. Morgan thinks she is untouchable, but Marcus has a plan to stop her, however crazy it might be.
It had been a long time since I read Partials, so I was glad this story began with a brief refresher to the first story without being too repetitive for a reader who didn't need a reminder. Then it quickly jumped into the fray and started with an action-packed story that never let up, which is pretty impressive for a 500+ page book. The story alternates between Kira's journey and life back on Long Island, neither of which are stable situations. Kira's journey is terrifying as she evades Partials and survives in a world with any number of horrors awaiting her around every corner. I always liked Kira, so watching her determination to save both the Partials and the humans was a winner in my book. All the other characters question the best way to save one or the other, but Kira will not abandon one population for the other, and her quest for answers about the origin of RM is fascinating.
This book is rife with moral ambiguities that make the story relevant to our current political and cultural climate. There are moments when Kira's moral compass is sent reeling with the choices that are forced upon her, and she she consistently has to decide if sacrificing one is acceptable when it means saving the many. For a character like Kira who doesn't deal well with moral ambiguity, these crises of confidence are both difficult and fascinating to read about. Wells did a great job with this series, and I can't wait to see how it all wraps up in the final book!
In Dan Wells' Partials, the war raging between humans and Partials (humanoid machines) isn't much of a war at all considering the humans are barely surviving and their inability to reproduce leaves them with a bleak end. But did you ever wonder how the world came to be in the grip of the Partials?
Heron is a newly created Partial soldier; her specialty is espionage. Built to be a spy, Heron was created without an empathy chip. What they didn't think to include was a "lack of self-preservation" chip. In the course of Heron's training and her big job, she realizes the humans who created her think of her as nothing more than a machine. While they may have created her, Heron is more than just nuts and bolts. And her decisions won't always make her creators happy.
I really enjoyed seeing the world from the Partials' side of things, especially because in the first full-length novel, it was clear there was more to this dystopia that was created. And the worst part of this is how easy it is to imagine these humans doing such horrible things with and to the Partials. This short story isn't vital to the continuation of the story, but it is certainly central to the theme of the series. You will want to check this one out if you plan to continue with Wells' series!
In a land where technology has become the very life force that keeps us functioning, have we ever thought about how that technology could backfire? I am not just talking about how its absence will leave us vulnerable, but what if that technology which we made so very smart, turns on its maker. In Partials, Dan Wells explores a world where engineered "Partial" humans turn on the hand that created them and take over the world.
Kira is training to be a medic. She decides to work in maternity because there is no better place to fight the RM virus than where it strikes- in babies who never live to see a week. The Partials, engineered part-humans designed to fight wars for us, took over the world eleven years ago and released RM. It destroyed the human population leaving only about 40,000 people clustered on Long Island. The people left are immune, but in those eleven years, no immune baby has been born. Now there is a directive from the Senate that requires girls 18 and older to get pregnant time and time again, knowing their babies will die, just so the medics can record data about how the virus spreads and try to find a cure.
Watching babies die and finding out her best friend is pregnant is enough to motivate Kira to do something no one has ever done before- capture a Partial to study for a cure. She convinces a few friends and soldiers to go along with her, but it is clear as soon as they enter Manhattan that the Partials are closer than they have ever been. Kira and the others are immediately attacked, but they manage to bring a Partial home. Unfortunately, the Senate just wants to destroy it. Kira convinces them to give her 5 days to study it, but more takes place in the laboratory than just blood samples. Kira realizes the Partials, Samm, is just like her. He not only looks like a human, he talks to her, he clearly doesn't want to die, and he has a secret too. The lives of the Partials are in just as much danger as the lives of the humans. It seems extinction is not just a human threat. Now the Partials and the humans must work together to find a way to save each other, but how can mortal enemies ever get over their own feud to save their biggest enemy?
There are many scary scenarios for the future, but most of them deal with the elimination of the human race. We don't want to go anywhere! Whether it be by zombies or plague or half-human robots we created, extinction isn't a pleasant future. Wells created a world that was not only in dire straights, it was downright creepy. The government had good intentions in trying to save the few people left, but the way they were going about it with forced pregnancies was terrifying. Even the fight between the rebels on the island and the official civilization where the last humans alive were willing to kill each other over ideals and territory was scary. The scariest part? They weren't anything people don't do already! Maybe not to this extreme, but there are plenty of comparable instances out there that would make for interesting discussions with a student who read this book.
The two main characters, Samm and Kira, were most interesting. Samm seems a little "blah" but I think it was an attempt to show the control and calculation of a being that is not human. It was a little too heavy handed at times (the term cyborg comes to mind), but eventually, you found yourself a cheerleader for Samm! Kira was a different story. I liked her a lot. She was that young woman who knew what she had to do and was willing to risk her own life to do it. You can tell Kira "no", but it won't do much good if she has set her mind to something. And she wasn't brash or impulsive, she just did what she needed to do without worrying about her own safety. Kira is a young woman you can be proud of.
This story has a number of military clashes and battles, human vs. human, Partial vs. human, and Partial vs. Partial. It isn't gratuitously violent, but violence is certainly a part of Wells' new world. The book is quite long and has a few slower spells (although as a whole it was quite exciting), so it might be best for a stronger reader. There is no sexual content or adult language. This is an exciting story, and you can almost see it translating to the Big Screen. I hope someone buys the rights and puts Kira out there, because I really liked this first installment of the series!
