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Partials
470 pages
A desperate race against extinction where medical mystery meets post-apocalyptic rebellion.
What it feels like
This novel plunges readers into a bleak, claustrophobic world where humanity is quite literally on a ticking clock. The reading experience is relentlessly propulsive, driven by a tense blend of medical thriller and post-apocalyptic action. You feel the heavy, dread-soaked atmosphere of a society pushed to its absolute limits, where survival demands terrible moral compromises. The prose is direct and urgent, mirroring the protagonist's clinical yet desperate mindset as she navigates a landscape of ruined cities and shattered trust. It is a story that wrestles with the ethics of survival and the definition of humanity, perfect for readers who devour high-stakes dystopian fiction that balances explosive action with chilling biological mysteries and complex ethical dilemmas.
- Mood
- bleak
- claustrophobic
- desperate
- suspenseful
- Tone
- urgent
- earnest
- tense
- clinical
- Pace
- propulsive
- Themes
- ethics of survival · bodily autonomy · what makes us human · questioning authority · medical ethics
- The writing
- Direct and action-oriented, grounded in gritty, pseudo-scientific detail that keeps the stakes feeling immediate.
- The arc
- Moves from suffocating despair in a dying society to a fierce, rebellious determination to uncover the truth.
- Who it's for
- Fans of 2010s YA dystopia who crave high stakes, medical mysteries, and morally gray post-apocalyptic survival.
Content notes
- infant mortality
- pandemic/virus themes
- forced pregnancy
- violence
- medical trauma
About the book
The human race is all but extinct after a war with Partials--engineered organic beings identical to humans--has decimated the population. Reduced to only tens of thousands by RM, a weaponized virus to which only a fraction of humanity is immune, the survivors in North America have huddled together on Long Island while the Partials have mysteriously retreated. The threat of the Partials is still imminent, but, worse, no baby has been born immune to RM in more than a decade. Our time is running out.
Kira, a sixteen-year-old medic-in-training, is on the front lines of this battle, seeing RM ravage the community while mandatory pregnancy laws have pushed what's left of humanity to the brink of civil war, and she's not content to stand by and watch. But as she makes a desperate decision to save the last of her race, she will find that the survival of humans and Partials alike rests in her attempts to uncover the connections between them--connections that humanity has forgotten, or perhaps never even knew were there.
Dan Wells, acclaimed author of I Am Not a Serial Killer, takes readers on a pulse-pounding journey into a world where the very concept of what it means to be human is in question--one where our humanity is both our greatest liability and our only hope for survival.
This description comes from the publisher.
Description from Open Library.
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