A review by xxivo
Smart Ass by Reese Morrison

adventurous dark hopeful lighthearted tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

A new robot with a different feel, but the same great romance.

Maxamillion felt very different from Quincey in the previous book. First of all he is not an android and that was such a fun twist to this book. When I imagined robot romance I did not think of an Knowledge, for how the book calls a computer without a body, becoming sentient and then falling in love. It was such a fun change compared to the previous book and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Maxamillion only controls other bots with prompts and guides them to do things, but in a way it still very much felt like those separate bots were extensions of him while at the same time they were not him either. This is a delicate balance that was done really well and made me enjoy the book even more.

Maxamillion and Ben have a very different dynamic compared to Quincey and Evan but gosh was this good too. Maxamillion knows how to handle Ben so well and knows what to do to rile him (and me) up. The sex scenes were absolutely hot because of it. Even more the amount of robots and robot appendages increased and made this lean even more into the robot sex appeal. And gosh yes was that fun. The pincers, the suckers the.... everything hell yes I wanted to keep reading about them so bad. 

Maxamillion also lived through a lot of distress for his first few weeks as a SPARK. These added to the complexitiy of him as a character and made me feel for him so much. This book really added that layer of lore about SPARKS that yeah, getting sentient really isn't something that just gently happens. We saw that the  stress spikes that Max felt had dire consequences and added a lot of plot to the book. This made the book quite intense towards the end for me but gosh Morrison writes good HEA when they're promised.

Concluding this book was absolutely lovely and for everyone who might one day want to fuck a computer.


I received an eARC and this was my honest review.