Reviews with content warning for Blood - Upgrade

Reviews tagging 'Blood'

loveallthis's review

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adventurous dark emotional hopeful mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated

3.0

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katyamwade's review

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Boring, too many gene code references. Also violence too much

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kathleencoughlin's review

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medium-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.5

I set this book aside for a while and tbh I wish I had left it unfinished. I had a lot of issues with the book that I won't bother to go into.

However,

I'm just absolutely baffled that Crouch thought, after everything that happened before and during the main plot of thr book, that the best ending would be more nonconsensual gene editing. I just don't even know where to begin with how problematic that is.

If you want to read something about upgraded humans, save yourself some time by skipping this and reading Ted Chiang's short story "Understand."

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mynameisrebecca's review

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adventurous challenging dark emotional informative mysterious reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

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littlehibou7's review

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hopeful reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

The first "meh" reaction for a Crouch novel from me. Maybe it's the sign of the times, or I'm truly becoming jaded, but "average white male briefly becomes even more insufferable before making the right-ish choice" just doesn't have the same appeal it used to.

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sneakysnam's review

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adventurous challenging tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

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avidreaderandgeekgirl's review

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adventurous dark emotional mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

I loved this book. The ending was perfect! You don't get a perfect ending with everything told to you. It doesn't end happily ever after, but that's what I love about Blake Crouch's books! I would have liked a bit more about his wife, Ava, Nadine, and Kara, but other than that perfect! It was a wild ride. I laughed, I cried, and I gasped in surprise. It was just a great book!

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reading_between_the_trees's review

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adventurous dark tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.0

Really disappointed in this one after loving recursion and dark matter.

I liked the message at the end about compassion, but other than that, I felt that the plot was mostly just violence, unnecessarily going really in-depth into science jargon that wasn’t explained well, and descriptions of guns. Made it very not engaging. I also didn’t love that all the non-men characters in the book were either not trusted enough to be involved or ended up betraying humanity in selfish and manipulative ways.

My biggest discomfort with the book was the mental/physical upgrade. Even though the message of the book is that intelligence isn’t what’s going to save us, we spent a tremendous amount of the book reading what felt like a fantasy of all the super smart and athletic things the main character did. On top of that, the mental traits paralleled autistic and ADHD traits (lack of sensory gating, studying people to understand their social cues, processing things quickly, not being able to slow down conversation and not interrupt people), so the conclusion that he couldn’t be part of his family and was lacking what made him human felt SUPER ableist.

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