Review: The Body Electric by Beth Revis

First, thanks to Netgalley and Scripturient Books for allowing  me to read an e-galley of this.  It actually got it after the book had been released, but I was very excited to see it.  I am a huge fan of the author, Beth Revis, as I loved her Across the Universe series.  And this one sounded right up my alley as well.  Another science fiction story.

The main character is Ella.  She and her mom work at a Spa type place that offers something only to the extremely rich called Reveries.  Reveries are something where they can hook into your brain and make you experience a really good memory.  It is something Ella's mom came up with, but hasn't wanted to turn it over to the government to make money. She wants to keep it as something nice to help people.  Ella's mother is also dying from a disease that is incurable.  When her mom first got sick, Ella's dad who was working on artificial intelligence, figured out a way to add nanobots that would help her stay healthy longer.  In fact, in this day and age, in part thanks to Ella's father, every person has nanobots that help to keep them from getting sick among other things like that.  Ella's father was killed in a terrorist attack though, and now it is just her and her mom, as well as the main owner of the Spa, Ms. White.  Ella is doing her internship at the spa so that she can be close to her mother. As the nanobots aren't going to keep her mom alive forever.

One day when her mom takes a bit of a turn for the worse, Ella goes for a walk.  To where her father's grave is. Although in this day and age, no one is buried anymore.  Instead they are cremated. But if you are someone rich, or important, like Ella's father, they will do something like plant a tree for them with a monument/gravestone.  And when Ella gets to her father's, she sees a young man standing there, as if he too is talking to her dad the way she plans to.  She doesn't recognized the boy, who says his name is Jack Tyler, but he seems to think they once had a past.  And he leaves her a cryptic message, that when other things besides her mother's sickness start to go wrong, she turns to that message for help.  She has been enlisted by the ruler of their country to use the reverie to try to see inside a Representative's brain.  One who they hear has been approached by a terrorist group.  And they hope Ella can get the information out of his head.

But as I said, things will go wrong.  There are androids/robots in this world, but no one has been able to figure out how to make them think for themselves yet.  Ella's father had been working on that before he died, but all his notes and work were lost in the explosion.  And as more and more goes wrong, Ella begins to wonder just who is really on her side.  Her friend who is on the moon at the military base for her internship seems to be not who she once was. This Jack Tyler may have worked with her father, and she even wonders if her father might not have been the man she thought he was.  She will have to determine if she really wants to help the government, or if the terrorists are really terrorists.

Such a great story.  The love story was okay because she didn't remember him even if he remembered her, so she was able to develop real feelings.  And there was at least one twist at the end that I wasn't expecting, so it was a great ending.  No cliffhanger, or love triangle, I highly recommend this for a great sci-fi read.  Very Isaac Asimov is what I thought as I read it.

BZRK by Michael Grant

I checked this book out from the library because I saw the sequel was available on Netgalley, and I love the Gone series by this author.  The science geek in me really ended up enjoying this book.  While really we get to know several of the characters throughout the book, we really have 2 central characters.  First is Noah.  His brother came back from the military and had gone insane.  We kind of begin with Noah going to visit his brother in the mental hospital.  His brother is mumbling lots of things that don't really make sense, including the word "berserk".  Sadie is the other kind of main character.  Although we don't really start out by meeting her, but by meeting her father and brother as they are flying to a business meeting, in Japan I think it was.  On their way something happens to the plane, and it crashes in a stadium.  The exact stadium that Sadie just happens to be at while she is on a date.  Sadie's family is rich, in fact her father's company is heavily involved in nanotechnology.  Both Sadie and Noah get recruited into the BZRK organization of hackers/nanotechnology experts to help defeat an organization called Nexus Humanus and their evil plan to take over some of the world's leaders in order to further their plans for mankind.  Both sides have the same types of technology.  Nanobots which can get inside and spy or at least attach the biots.  Biots are nano-organisms created from actual pieces of a person, and then they become a part of that person to the point that whoever they came from can then see through their eyes and control them.  The problem is this is that they are a part of you, and to lose them, well it is like a part of you actually dies, and it can drive you crazy.  Just the training of going down to that tiny level can be stressful.  There are all kinds of things that are freaky looking when they get that small.  For example, a lot of times the biots try to get into the brain through the eyeballs, but on everyone's eyelashes are tiny creatures called Demodex.  And while they are kind of frightening at the size they are compared to the biots, really they aren't dangerous at all.
Other characters are the evil twins, conjoined twins, Charles and Benjamin Armstrong who run the Nexus group.  On their side is one of the best "twitchers" as the people who do this are called, and he goes by the name Bug Man.  Vincent is one of the good guys, but he is an interesting character as he has an actual medical issue that he can't feel pleasure.
So we've got Noah trying to do something to make up for what happened to his brother, and Sadie who is now alone in the world, with a chance to get revenge for her brother and father.  In BZRK, everyone takes a new name, Sadie chooses Plath from the basic rules given to her, and then Noah is named Keats.
I can see that for some this book may be way too technical, but that is kind of what I really liked about it!  And reading all the descriptions of what things looked like at that small of scale was kind of cool.  I could totally see a movie out of this, but only if someone who could afford awesome special effects did it, so that they could make this stuff look as real as possible.

The Bar Code Prophecy (Bar Code #3) by Suzanne Weyn

As usual I have to start this by thanking both Netgalley and the publisher, Scholastic this time, for letting me read an egalley of this.  I was so excited to get this as I'd really enjoyed the first two books in the series.  Unfortunately, both of them came out, and I read both of them, before I was blogging, at least before I was blogging on here.  It is possible I blogged about them somewhere else, but I don't really know how to get back to that and find them.  So, I was able to look on Goodreads and see what I rated them, and I have to say that my ratings have gone down one star with each book.  While the story was still good this time, I have to say that maybe because of all the dystopians that I've been reading lately, this one felt a little rushed.  It was a very short book, only about 200 pages.  And I assume it will be in the same format as the others, a small paperback.  In this book we start with a new character, and our protagonist from the other novels, Kayla, is now a "legend" you might say in the bar code resistance.  Global 1 has supposedly "solved" all the issues with the tattoo keeping track of all your genetic information so now companies can't fire you for having issues, and supposedly there are no longer nanobots injected when you get the tattoo that can kill you if you have issues that are not genetically desirable.  But Grace, our new main character, believes in Global 1.  Her father works there, and has had issues since the whole big fiasco.  She even works there part time.  But she is about to turn 17 which means it is time for her to get her tattoo.  However, she's been doing a lot of climbing with a cute guy from school, Eric.  And he seems to be interested in her now.  But for some reason he also seems a bit against her getting the tattoo, but he won't really tell her why.  Once she gets her tattoo though, all hell breaks loose.  She finds out she's adopted, and her real father is the "father" of the bar code tattoo.  And her adopted family, that she's always believed is her family, disappears on the same day.  Eric shows up to help her, and takes her into the resistance.  It turns out that both Grace and Eric may be part of some prophecy that the Native Americans think points to the end of the world. I do love that the book brings in meteors coming close to earth as a possible issue.  I enjoyed getting back into this world.  But, my biggest issue is how quickly everything happens.  We jump from event to event with not a lot of details.  I just feel this book could have been fleshed out a bit more to help it fit in with a lot of the popular dystopians out there today.  Then again, maybe this is a good dystopian for someone who just wants a quick read and doesn't need all the extra detail.  So, it's a good story, just a bit disappointing after all the books I've read lately.