My public library summoned me again to let me know that more of my on-hold avalanche has landed, so of course I jumped to it and scooped up the … snow … of … okay, I’m bailing out of this metaphor. Where’s the St. Bernard with whiskey strapped to his neck?
I got two more books I put on hold, plus I got to say hey (distantly and en-masked) to a former co-worker who has always been super nice and is steering this branch through the pandemic with aplomb as its manager and was rocking a smart dress with matching cardigan in the best example of my people’s fashion tendencies. Win-win, with another win tacked on for good measure.
Scan of my library copy’s cover
The Cousins, by Karen M. McManus (library hardback): Your estranged grandma sends you an old-fashioned summons to the resort island where the whole family used to live until the kids (your folks) got disinherited all of sudden when they were in college. Your grandma wants you to work for her for the summer. Do you go?
For the three cousins in this YA thriller, they don’t actually have much of a choice. Milly’s mother has become independently rich, but she still wants to reconnect with the matriarch, and Aubrey and Jonah are both coming from less fortunate situations that their parents slid into during their later years.
So the cousins pack up, head out, and meet each other for the first time in at least a decade before traveling to the resort and immediately tripping over like seven family secrets over the course of a few weeks, falling headfirst into them and barely getting out alive to look at things from the new perspectives they all gained (instead of money).
There are several major twists to this story, and they’re done very well; they’re telegraphed clearly but subtly, so that when you go back and re-read them you’re like, “Of course!” but they’re not obvious on the first go-round. They make sense for the characters and add a deeper dimension to them that we already know. And they enhance and connect the plot rather than dominate it.
Basically, and here is your minor SPOILER ALERT, the family covered up a murder, and someone close to them took advantage of that chaos and secrecy to take over.
I enjoyed this book’s plot mechanics very much, smooth as they are, but the character details were great, too. I don’t remember much about being a teenager at this point, but the cousins seem like real people and not just pawns in a bigger family game. They’ve got their own issues to work out, and their own way of growing into what they need to do, and I believed every step of their journey here. Which is honestly more than a lot of YA books, and why I’m not super keen on the genre unless there’s another hook to it (like this one had).
I do remember a lot about being an only child and how that can give you unique bonds to the other kids your age in the family, and how sometimes it makes your status even more uncertain when a big secret comes crashing through what you’ve managed to forge together. And this book nails it.
If you like character-centered thrillers that have just enough intrigue to make them page-turners, you’ll enjoy this for sure. And McManus also wrote One of Us is Lying and Two Can Keep a Secret, which the book jacket and ye olde Goodreads inform me are not related to this book world-wise but are similar in tone.
Scan of my library copy’s cover
The Sentient, by Nadia Afifi (library paperback):
On the other hand, we have this sci fi novel about the first successful human cloning and the lengths people will go to stop it.
I should’ve liked this book. It’s about a 25-year-old scientist, Amira, who just completed her schooling for neurobiological therapy after escaping to the science mecca of the U.S. from the religious compound on which she grew up. Now she’s basically graduated with the equivalent of a master’s degree, as far as I can tell, and moves into her sort of apprentice stage. They place her in charge of keeping the last subject of recent human cloning experiments alive; two others have died and they suspect some sort of psychological trauma caused their sudden physical distress. Amira gets to make sure that doesn’t happen to the third. No pressure or anything, y’all.
And I love the way her work is presented. It’s a hybrid between traditional talk therapy and future-y machine-based brain probing. She specializes in interpreting dreams, and she uses sensory probes that project holograms of thoughts and your subconscious into meatspace like detailed holograms. The patient still has to cooperate, though, which is tough because the last subject doesn’t for a long time. All Amira can tell is that she’s also a girl from a compound and has suffered similar traumas growing up, so Amira uses her own memories and empathy to get the patient to clear things up, as it were.
Then Amira sees that someone’s tampered with the patient’s memory, which is what’s causing her distress (and likely what happened to the others). Trying to figure who did it and how leads them both down a rabbit hole of secret high-up deals that shows, surprise, not everybody is actually in this for the reasons they give on the surface.
Amira finds an ally in a crooked space port cop, plus her computer coder best friend who’s working on the same project, and they finally wrangle the trust of the patient to get her away from all the conspiracies to keep her and her new baby clone safe.
It sounds so cool. The world building is excellent, with enough connections to now so that the future it paints seems plausible, especially the part where the human cloning project is super controversial; and the truly sci fi bits (elevator to space! quantum computing! subconscious holograms!) are natural outgrowths of current possibilities if you squint a little.
And the characters, while a little stock, aren’t stereotypes, and they all have good reasons to go in the directions they do. The ending is well-built, although it does read like the author wanted to secure a sequel but wasn’t sure if she would by the time she finished, so it’s a touch too open-endedly optimistic for my taste.
However. Everything felt sort of flat, especially after the true action got going.
I’m not even 100% sure why. I have a few guesses:
There are too many characters involved in the conspiracy, maybe? I get that this is a huge, public deal, and lots of people want to alter it for their own reasons, but I honestly couldn’t keep track of who was fighting for what after a certain number of reveals. The one that made the most sense was the one that kept the closest relationship to the project itself, so maybe trim everything back to just that guy, plus one trying to disrupt everything for religious reasons, and you’d have all the facets covered without needing like eight top-level government scientists with their own agendas being equally important. It’s confusing.
Something about the narrator Amira seems impersonal, which is crazy because we get such good insight into her past and motivations. I guess she just also seems like a bit of a goody-two-shoes. She stays a company gal for far too long after she’s discovered shitty hidden details about her employer, and I get it, they rescued her, basically; she’s indebted to them for letting her live her dreams. But I wanted her to immediately get and stay skeptical when she found the first lie they’d told her about the project she’s working on. I think it might’ve helped if she were written in first person instead of third? Maybe? I don’t know.
Too many info dumps about the city, company, and project’s history? I found them to be added in mostly natural ways, which is already a feat in any sci fi; but emphasis on “mostly.” (It’s kind of like when someone at the library asks where the bathrooms are and I tell them and then also mention that we have reference books on those shelves over there and pretty soon it’s too late, I can’t bail out of a full spiel about our whole first floor without looking even more awkward, and the person’s just waiting politely for me to finish so they can go pee.) And in the book, gestures tend to be over-described when they’re part of an important event. Which, I get the impulse, but it’s not strictly necessary and clutters up the action a bit.
Anyway. I would still recommend this to people who want to get more into sci fi, as it’s an accessible example of the genre. But it didn’t quite have the impact I wanted from it on my own reading.