Tag: futuristic

Review: The Ones We’re Meant to Find by Joan He

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A hardcover copy of The Ones We're Meant to Find rests on a wooden table in a coffee shop. An iced green tea and a coffee sit behind it. A laptop rests on the book's right.

Alexis:

I’ve been trying to read more sci-fi and dystopian, so I was excited when I won this book and got it in the mail!

The Ones We’re Meant to Find follows sisters Kasey and Cee. Cee is stuck on an abandoned island with nothing but a robot for company. She has amnesia, but she does remember her sister, Kasey, is out there somewhere. And she needs to find her.

Kasey is a 16-year-old STEM prodigy living in an eco-city, which is basically a city hovering in mid-air that’s an oasis from the rest of the polluted planet. She has always felt like a loner, and she can’t stop thinking about when Cee went missing.

I really liked how Kasey and Cee have opposite personalities. Cee is a caring, social butterfly, and Kasey the quiet loner; their characters are foils of each other, and it works well. 

I read He’s debut novel, The Descendant of the Crane, and I feel like both her writing style and her characterization have improved! The pacing was great, and I enjoyed seeing the plot unfurl, along with a massive plot twist.

That being said, if I’m being honest, I sometimes wasn’t sure what was going on in Kasey’s chapters. Because she’s a scientist, her chapters contain a lot of science, and I had to re-read certain paragraphs, especially since He created the future science herself. I honestly feel like I need to just re-read the entire book to get a better picture, as I sometimes had a hard time picturing what the world looked like. I almost wanted more info dumps, because scientific and futuristic technology was thrown at the reader rather than explained.

I also had a bit of a hard time connecting with Kasey, as she often felt a little too unfeeling; however, I know that was intentional, so I didn’t let it affect my overall rating. 

I was especially invested in Cee’s story and the mystery of her past. I loved the themes of humanity, sisterhood, and the environment. And not to mention, I love the cover!

VERDICT: ⭐⭐⭐⭐/5

Review: Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed

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Alexis:

Here are some words to describe Gather the Daughters: disturbing, haunting, cultish. The book focuses on very dark, heavy themes, including pedophilia, child marriage, and incest. 

In Gather the Daughters, a group of people live on an island, where very summer, the children run free. But when the girls start their periods, they are considered to be women, and must marry and have children as fast as possible. The rest of the world is post-apocalyptic, and is simply called “the wastelands.” Fathers are encouraged to groom their daughters from a young age, but are supposed to stop once the girls hit puberty. 

The book tells the story of multiple girls. Their lives are very similar and overlap. Caitlin is eager for knowledge and is allowed to read books from the wastelands; Janey, at seventeen, has been starving herself for years in order to prevent her period from coming.

This was a haunting and brutal book to read. While Melamed’s descriptions and writing are good, the book was slow-paced. I also wish the ending was more radical and made more of an impact.

Overall, I can’t really say I enjoyed reading this book, and I did skim through some of the middle. But it definitely made me think.

VERDICT: 3 stars