Review: Mort(e) by Robert Repino

Mort(e) by Robert Repino
Published: January 2015
Series: War with No Name #1

Tagline: Mort(e), an anthropomorphized house cat, treks through a world-ending war between humans and car-sized ants in order to rescue his platonic (?) best friend, a dog named Sheba.

Plot Overview (because it's pretty weird!): Let's start from the beginning. Ants have evolved in such a way that they are super-intelligent, some even growing to be larger than vehicles. At the same time, the ants have evolved most animals so they have hands instead of paws, they stand on their hind legs, and they can think and talk. Yes, ants have made animals sentient and aware. Animals change overnight, not having to slowly learn how to understand or read, but simply knowing. As one can imagine, this causes many animals to rebel against humans (specifically their 'masters') and the War with No Name rages. Meanwhile, Mort(e) fights the War with No Name only as a way to pass time until he can somehow find an orange and white dog he knew from before he was aware. Her name is Sheba and she means the world to Mort(e).

My review: This book is AMAZING. Repino creates these extremely original characters that grow over time and create lasting relationships with each other and the reader. I found it particularly interesting to find out some of the dark pasts of the characters introduced. They are presented as stories of slaves being freed from masters, because in reality all of the pets that become sentient realize that they have been enslaved within their homes and made to live their lives a certain way.

I found that a lot of times, you can take yourself out of this book being about cats standing on their back legs and talking to ants with weird headsets. It's strange, yes, but Repino makes the animals very humanoid because they are supposed to take the place of humans on Earth, so they adjust to speaking, standing, living in 'normal' ways.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a different sort of war book. It's violent at times, also reminding me of an apocalyptic novel. The animals that survive the humans must make do with the remnants of their humans' abodes, scrounging for food when their predecessors were omnivores and some animals are obligate carnivores. This novel was an extremely original take on a revolution that may never come to pass, but I would definitely consider it for an alternate history.

Rating: 5/5 stars

Review: The Many Selves of Katherine North by Emma Geen

Disclaimer: I received a digital copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Many Selves of Katherine North by Emma Geen

Published June 7, 2016

Plot Overview

We follow Kit, a nineteen-year-old phenomenaut for ShenCorp, a company that specializes in projecting a person's consciousness into that of a lab-grown animal. This technology proves crucial to understanding different species' environments, experiences, and general biology. Kit has been 'jumping' as a phenomenaut for ShenCorp for seven years, fulfilled by the idea that she is helping the company understand animals' motives and needs so that humans and animals can coexist peacefully. ShenCorp has the ability to project Kit, and other phenomenauts, into many different species including but not limited to birds, fish, and large mammals. Despite her seemingly successful, and abnormally long, experience with ShenCorp, Kit starts experiencing strange and unexplained anomalies during her jumps. No longer sure if her employer has the same goals as her, Kit has to decide if she will pursue her suspicions or continue to play along with ShenCorp's new business model.

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My Review

This book has a slightly confusing, slow start, but man does it really catch you. Personally, the free copy I received was a little strange when it came to format, but considering the general science-y vibe that comes along with this story, I wasn't entirely sure if it was intentional or not.

Thriller. I wasn't expecting this book to move at such a fast pace once I got into it, but considering the mysteries and company secrets that Kit comes to uncover, it can only be expected that she must be on her toes in order to not be discovered. I felt that as the reader, I was successfully made to side with Kit in her discoveries of suspicious information via her phenomenaut jumps.

Science!! Almost constantly, I felt as if the author must have truly done a great deal of scientific research in the writing of this novel, or possibly even had some sort of Biology degree. The science of phenomenautism is extremely well thought-out and detailed. Not only that, but the different species that are encountered are so greatly varied and described at such length that I immediately took Kit's experiences in their bodies as truth and fact. I'm not 100% sure if all of the things that she experiences were truly how different species exists, but I guarantee that you will agree: Emma Geen really has an eye for describing the environment from unexpected perspective.

I truly enjoyed my experience with this novel and I'm excited that it will be in print very shortly! I would definitely recommend this to readers who enjoy the more science-centric science fiction, not only the existence of something artificial or theoretical, but the true, very convincing descriptions of how something could exist. This novel was written with a critical reader in mind who is no stranger to the scifi genre.

My Rating: 4/5 stars

Review: The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

Originally Published: September 2002

Plot Overview

The World: In a time when illegal drug production is the most structurally sound economic system, the country of Opium is prosperous. Opium is a strip of land that covers the border between the United States of America and what was once Mexico, now called Aztlán. The king of this drug empire: El Patrón, an ancient man who craves for the way of life he knew as a child, over 100 years ago. Opium is thriving because of its product: poppy plants. The expansive fields of poppy are farmed by eejits, almost literally mindless workers that must be commanded to remember their most basic of functions such as rest, drink water, work.

The Boy: Our main character is Matt, or Matteo Alacrán, a pre-adolescent clone of El Patrón. Matt has been kept a secret from El Patrón's descendants who currently reside on the poppy farm. Matt does not know what it means to be a clone or why everyone thinks he is no better than an animal, a beast, a mistake. Matt is extremely intelligent and precocious. He seeks out answers, he is willful and outspoken; he is much more like the powerful El Patrón than any of the family would like to admit.

The Problem: El Patrón is creeping on 150 years old. Through medical procedures that Matt cannot begin to fathom, El Patrón has plateaued into a state of mental decay, while his physical health appears to wax and wane. El Patrón may favor and care for Matt's studies and well-being, but the weaker the old man becomes, the closer Matt realizes he is to danger of being dismissed, killed, or worse by the Alacrán estate. They loathe him for being a 'filthy' clone whose very existence is unnatural, so if his benefactor, the very man whose DNA he shares, passes away... what will become of the filthy beast?

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My Review

Wow. Just... wow. Do you ever have a book on your shelf that you bought years ago, but you really can't remember what it is supposed to be about or why you originally wanted to read it? The House of the Scorpion is that book for me on so many levels. I asked for this book several years ago as a Christmas present, but something about the semi-lackluster cover just threw me off. I knew very little about the plot and even less about the author, but as part of my 2016 bookish goals to read more from my old TBR lists, I picked up this book about a week ago and never looked back.

I had no idea to expect a science fiction novel from what the excerpt led me to believe was a relatively realistic book. Without spoiling too much of the midway-point plot, cloning is almost one of the least scientifically advanced projects that is present in this novel. Nancy Farmer has created a very scary world within a more old-school Mexico story. Because El Patrón is so stuck in his old childhood, it is not surprising that he limits the residence of his family to such a technology deprived way of life. Some of the undertones of the overall plot included: clone rights, classism, socialism, and even basic human rights.

The reason I loved this book? It was not at all what I expected. I'm a huge fan of dystopian novels and general science fiction, but mixed in with family drama and a morally suspicious drug farm: incalculably entertaining. At times, I felt like I was watching a telenovela (or for those of you out there not into your daytime television, a Spanish soap opera) with no short of disapproving father figures and outbursts of rage or excitement. Don't let that description fool you, for although this is a book about Matt's family 'drama,' it is also an infuriating mash up of the ways in which a 'subhuman' clone can be disrespected and shoved around. It really made me think about what it means to be a person, or more specifically an individual. Matt is quite literally not an individual, and struggles with the fact that he is a clone of a feared drug lord daily. He is afraid for his life, for the lives of the few individuals in the estate that actually care for him as a human being, and Nancy Farmer has created an easy to bond with character in this book. This is by far the most connected I've felt with a main character in a while, not to mention it was a boy almost half my age!

This was an exciting book I will be holding onto for a long time to come. I'm not 100% sure if I will read the sequel (that came out over a decade after the original), but you guys will be the first to know if I do!

My Rating: 4.5/5 stars