Lauren James

Representation: Asian main character

7/10, now that I look back at it this wasn't the best sci-fi book ever but it was still enjoyable despite all its flaws and there were a lot of them. The story itself was super predictable and I could see where it was going as I read on, it sometimes dragged with some slower scenes and the characters were not fleshed out but they got the job done; at least the world-building was intriguing and that helped me get through this book sometimes. It was about the two main characters Theo and Hester who suddenly got weird plant powers from nowhere and others got them so they all got together to understand and develop their powers further but I still didn't know why they had them until they discovered a company mutated them to have powers and they did a bunch of other shady stuff and the characters stopped them eventually. I liked that the book mentioned some protests against the company and there was still a long way to go to undo the damages that they made and the antagonist rich boy named Edgar Warren was kind of interesting. However, the whole message about the environment was kind of shoved in my face sometimes rather than letting me get the message myself which wasn't a good aspect of the book but it didn't matter much. If you like a story about the environment this one is for you.… (mais)

Representation: Asian main character
Trigger warnings: Infertility themes, helicopter crash, near death experience

8/10, now that I look back this was an interesting sci-fi novel but seeing that there are flaws here and there that could've been improved I wouldn't pick this up again but maybe the other books this author has written could be better than this so where do I even begin. It starts off with a small backstory with an emergency call being underway about a bleeding nose that won't stop and soon lots of people succumb to it then it cuts to the main characters Lowrie and Shen living in the middle of London with an aging community picking up artefacts from times gone by and all the buildings are collapsing when a helicopter crashes into Big Ben and destroys it and no one knows why yet. The main characters look on the dying remnants of the Internet to see how humanity died and no it wasn't a meteor, climate change or zombies, rather it was a pandemic which caused everyone to be infertile and the human population slowly died off from there but I don't know where the virus came from. Anyways it looks like almost all hope is lost for humanity until Lowrie and Shen searched for news articles on the Internet and it turns out that humans began to build robots called "Baby-Grows" and at first they weren't considered human but then they were and I found that confusing but I could understand since biological flesh and blood humans were out of the picture so humanity tried to find a new way to survive, eventually these new types of humans outnumbered the biological humans and it became a part of society. This segues into another plot twist where Lowrie and Shen were apparently the last biological humans ever since they were born from frozen embryos and the rest of the humans were Baby-Grows. Some of the latter were suffering from a computer bug but I don't know why they have this, maybe it was a human who disliked them, I don't know but in the end Lowrie and Shen found the chip in a secret vault to fix them wrapping up the book on a high note.… (mais)

this was really interesting to read. at the start it had a lot of comments about how toxic fandom can be, which ive seen a bit of on the internet. then there was all the mystery and the murder stuff and i had no idea where that was going even though i probably should have. the plot and characters were really complex, i found gottie especially interesting around her morality and how unreliable she was. her apparent motives changed a lot through the book, and the ending especially showed her quite different from the start even though she hadnt really changed that much.… (mais)

modern style young adult isnt really my usual preferred style, but i enjoyed this. the concept, what with ghosts who live in a building and can't leave, at first i thought it would be a bit like the tv show ghosts (which i liked), but this was quite different, (obviously, since its a novel with a central conflict and plot and stuff not a comedy tv show). the world building with the ghosts and how they worked was interesting, as well as the general concepts, and i liked slowly figuring out more about what was really happening as more was revealed as the story unfolded. harriets character and the stuff with her grandmother and that whole family was interesting, and i liked the other ghosts as well. the concept seemed quite unique, or at least i dont think ive read another book much like this one
I read like 250 pages of this today i think, although i do generally find that the modern young adult style is a lot quicker and easier to read than even stuff like fantasy books for kids/teenagers which is something closer to what i read more often.… (mais)