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A review by kblincoln
The Lost Girl by Sangu Mandanna
3.0
I dithered mightily over this rating. It's probably more like 3.5 stars. The writing itself was fine. The main character, Eva, was plucky and conflicted...it's just...well...it wasn't to my taste.
Sometimes I wonder if some books don't click with me because I've watched too much tv/movies and read too many books with science fiction and fantasy themes. Once a trope is explored once or twice, something new needs to be added to it or it doesn't hold my interest.
And so with The Lost Girl, I felt it didn't open up for me any new territory in the murky moral pit of cloning.
The main character is an Echo. She was created and raised at the request of the parents of a girl named Amarra. She reads Amarra's diary, memorizes her favorite things, and must endure major experiences that Amarra undergoes. She's not allowed to do anything that Amarra wouldn't do. All this is preparation for the remote chance that Amarra might die-- and then the Echo will take her place.
Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go also explore the ethics of cloning beings with no respect for their right to a life. The major theme in The Lost Girl is how the girl Echo, later naming herself Eva, tries to fight the fate laid out for her by her creators.
Like I said above, the writing is fine. One of the locations is Bangalore and the descriptions of life there are cool. Eva's sympathetic and I found myself rooting for her, but part of the reason her story didn't feel like it added anything for me to the clone conundrum was that a lot of the rules regarding Echoes and their lives seemed arbitrary and frankly, so incredibly anti-human/civil rights that I couldn't believe it. (Reading Frankenstein is punishable by death? Really? Cute concept, but the theme of a creation rebelling against its maker is so prevalent in our society (adam and eve in the garden of Eden, for example) that this arbitrary rule annoyed me.) Echoes are illegal in some countries, yet the creators brand the Echoes in a highly visible area? I longed for a more complex, realistic status for Eva, one more likely to occur in a Western Industrialized country.
If this is the first time you're coming across cloning in fiction, than I think this book is a very accessible, action/light romance starting point to that murky swamp. So it probably deserves the full 4 stars.
I just found myself skimming sometimes.
This Book's Snack Rating: A can of Pringles for the snackable action with sci-fi elements in a chip with only light substance
Sometimes I wonder if some books don't click with me because I've watched too much tv/movies and read too many books with science fiction and fantasy themes. Once a trope is explored once or twice, something new needs to be added to it or it doesn't hold my interest.
And so with The Lost Girl, I felt it didn't open up for me any new territory in the murky moral pit of cloning.
The main character is an Echo. She was created and raised at the request of the parents of a girl named Amarra. She reads Amarra's diary, memorizes her favorite things, and must endure major experiences that Amarra undergoes. She's not allowed to do anything that Amarra wouldn't do. All this is preparation for the remote chance that Amarra might die-- and then the Echo will take her place.
Nancy Farmer's The House of the Scorpion and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go also explore the ethics of cloning beings with no respect for their right to a life. The major theme in The Lost Girl is how the girl Echo, later naming herself Eva, tries to fight the fate laid out for her by her creators.
Like I said above, the writing is fine. One of the locations is Bangalore and the descriptions of life there are cool. Eva's sympathetic and I found myself rooting for her, but part of the reason her story didn't feel like it added anything for me to the clone conundrum was that a lot of the rules regarding Echoes and their lives seemed arbitrary and frankly, so incredibly anti-human/civil rights that I couldn't believe it. (Reading Frankenstein is punishable by death? Really? Cute concept, but the theme of a creation rebelling against its maker is so prevalent in our society (adam and eve in the garden of Eden, for example) that this arbitrary rule annoyed me.) Echoes are illegal in some countries, yet the creators brand the Echoes in a highly visible area? I longed for a more complex, realistic status for Eva, one more likely to occur in a Western Industrialized country.
If this is the first time you're coming across cloning in fiction, than I think this book is a very accessible, action/light romance starting point to that murky swamp. So it probably deserves the full 4 stars.
I just found myself skimming sometimes.
This Book's Snack Rating: A can of Pringles for the snackable action with sci-fi elements in a chip with only light substance