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A review by gauvvaine
Two Weeks' Notice by Rachel Caine
4.0
i think the thing that strikes me most about this series is how tight & solid caine's writing is. the pacing is perfect, not a single word is out of place, everything happens just where and when it should.
the world & the politics in this are absolutely fucking horrifying lmao. i didn't put this on the rape shelf because no one is sexually assaulted, but make no mistake, the people in charge could not care less about anyone's consent. the only thing is that it's never sexualized; it's all medical, all a complete and total disregard for peoples' choices when it comes to their own bodies and lives. pharmadene is as slimy as they come: they designed a drug that was originally supposed to cure cancer and discovered, quite by accident, that it actually revived people from the dead and turned them nearly indestructible, and because the revived's bodies will slowly decay without this same drug they own them body and soul, and they view them as less than human.
shit gets even worse in this one lmao. one of joe's kids gets kidnapped and held as ransom for bryn's obedience, and at one point she gets locked in a mental institute where she is tortured for several hours (thankfully off-page, with brief and vague descriptions), and later, after she escapes, the villains talk about burning an entire building of the complex down to erase the evidence, regardless of the patients still living there. there's also a brief allude in the midst of the torture to an attempted past rape of bryn by one of her fellow soldiers when she'd been in the army.
my only real complaint (bc i knew what i was getting into in terms of consent and horror; i will however admit i was not expecting the cannibalistic super zombies at the end) is that i'm honestly rly uncomfortable with bryn's reaction to the reveal of patrick's ex-wife. like, i do understand why she's hurt, and why she would react poorly; what i'm not so comfortable with is the way it's written. she and patrick have barely even begun dating at this point, and he legit thought his wife was dead. we haven't gotten any details yet, but it was apparently a very traumatic point of his life: he was under no obligation to talk to her about that? it would have been nice to see that acknowledged in the text.
anyway, this is a good sequel to a good book, and overall i enjoyed it a lot. looking forward to reading the next one at some point.
the world & the politics in this are absolutely fucking horrifying lmao. i didn't put this on the rape shelf because no one is sexually assaulted, but make no mistake, the people in charge could not care less about anyone's consent. the only thing is that it's never sexualized; it's all medical, all a complete and total disregard for peoples' choices when it comes to their own bodies and lives. pharmadene is as slimy as they come: they designed a drug that was originally supposed to cure cancer and discovered, quite by accident, that it actually revived people from the dead and turned them nearly indestructible, and because the revived's bodies will slowly decay without this same drug they own them body and soul, and they view them as less than human.
shit gets even worse in this one lmao. one of joe's kids gets kidnapped and held as ransom for bryn's obedience, and at one point she gets locked in a mental institute where she is tortured for several hours (thankfully off-page, with brief and vague descriptions), and later, after she escapes, the villains talk about burning an entire building of the complex down to erase the evidence, regardless of the patients still living there. there's also a brief allude in the midst of the torture to an attempted past rape of bryn by one of her fellow soldiers when she'd been in the army.
my only real complaint (bc i knew what i was getting into in terms of consent and horror; i will however admit i was not expecting the cannibalistic super zombies at the end) is that i'm honestly rly uncomfortable with bryn's reaction to the reveal of patrick's ex-wife. like, i do understand why she's hurt, and why she would react poorly; what i'm not so comfortable with is the way it's written. she and patrick have barely even begun dating at this point, and he legit thought his wife was dead. we haven't gotten any details yet, but it was apparently a very traumatic point of his life: he was under no obligation to talk to her about that? it would have been nice to see that acknowledged in the text.
anyway, this is a good sequel to a good book, and overall i enjoyed it a lot. looking forward to reading the next one at some point.