Reviews with content warning for Genocide - The Ones We're Meant to Find

Reviews tagging 'Genocide'

The Ones We're Meant to Find by Joan He

4 reviews

courtneyfalling's review

adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

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

2.5

I'll start by saying science fiction isn't normally my thing. I picked this book up because it's been near-universally loved on BookTube, I liked the climate justice concept, and admittedly the cover was gorgeous. But it was... underwhelming. Some of the pacing felt off: I wanted more reveals about Kasey's background in particular earlier, since so many of her actions and motivations didn't make sense without fuller context. On a deeper level, some of the book's entire framing felt off: I found myself agreeing with Meridian a lot that Kasey, Actinium, and P2C/the officials in the eco-cities were elitist gatekeepers with no real authority to rank the climate footprint of those in the territories, especially not when withholding supplies and offshoring the ickier parts of lifestyle maintenance to them. The idea that "it's every individual's responsibility to live greenly and they and their descendants deserve significant punishment if they do not" submerges the fact that someone is subjectively offering that punishment and totally ignores the political economy that makes green footprints much more easily available to a select few. And on reflection after finishing the book I realized the main reason I'm sticking on this moral part is that at its core it reads as eco-fascist.

Even without that huge sticking point, I struggled relating to any of the main characters. Kasey is so science-focused to a fault, where it almost felt like Joan He was trying as hard as possible to make Kasey bot-like and unlikeable (and part of what rubbed me really wrong about this was that it ended up with Kasey feeling autism-coded and her most autism-coded traits being the 'worst' parts of her representation). By comparison, Cee seemed so much more human, and I feel like that was an obvious point. The twist happened, I was like what for maybe a chapter or two, and then it just sunk in, like duh.

Also... idk. I like enemies-to-lovers sometimes but the whole plot line between Cee and Hero was hard to connect with.

"Girl programmed to find her sister and boy programmed by the sister's former-partner-turned-archenemy to stop the girl at whatever cost" was much more of a heavy-handed, symbolic device than an actual relationship or space for character development. Hero's murder attempts got old quickly and really made the whole thing unromantic and frustrating.

Content Warnings