Kate Jarvik Birch

The not so thrilling and to a book that literally only has four characters at best most scenes. Mediocre romance that should be labeled horror concludes in this final book.

What are my thoughts upon this mess, however?

It has been 9 days since Missy gave herself up, she's still the superior character and Ella is still shaming her with a little bit of Marcus sass on the side. I feel all of my emotions go towards Missy and none go towards ella. I could not care if Ella got thrown in a meat grinder in this book. That's a great example for how bad this writing is: it has made me not care about the main character so much that I am worried about the only other character this book has shown me that isn't the owner of Ella. The other pet who is barely a character.

#JusticeforMissy

Despite all of these slavery moments the fact that they're all abused, the dead babies, the fact that these guys will be killed if they are caught. None of this matters to our main character. LOL thanks that everybody should be scared and maybe we shouldn't killed these people who are committing to eugenics and murder. She sees the mess still alive. I wanted to be angry but honestly I felt my eyes rolling into my head too much to be mad.

She's spirals into the state of wondering if maybe the people who are creating all these pets and forcing parents to watch their children die, as well as killing imperfect babies are the good guys. And my eyes were already rolling but now they were narrowed and mad. It's bad. This is bad!
I don't know how to word it. There's just so many books that have made me disgusted, angry, bored, so many emotions but this book.

This book is stupid. Stupid. It's so stupid.

Missy has been kidnapped for nine days and a pairs to be sitting in the same seat/cage for the last week and a few days, waiting for some form of rescue. My immersion has been dead for a long time, but for some reason this stood out to me and bothered me more than the rest of the book. We can have our dumb protagonists think what if we're the bad guys. We can have our dumb protagonist side with the bad guys. We can have our dumb protagonist hesitate to kill the bad guys. But to tell me that they just waited nine days while somebody was strapped to the cage and not moved around. I can't. I cannot with this book.

There are characters dying left, right, and sideways.

We barely had any characters to begin with. And I'm supposed to believe all of this is happening and our main character just left them waiting and they just sat there. What is this book supposed to be?

It's listed as a romance, but I haven't found any romance in it.

What the fuck?

So Ella explodes everyone and kills Missy because she decided to put a gun down earlier. Except, the guy she blows it up to kill. That guy. He's still alive. So what was the point? So Missy could just die. So basically, they decide to take him to court. And even though they blew all this stuff up and nothing came of it, they taking the court and win. And this one guy is responsible for the last thirty years of human pets. And they realize human pets are still human. Grand finale everyone.

Still 0 stars. It almost became half a star but then the bomb scene happened and the magical flash drive scene. I'm so done with this.

I expected just a hint of soul. It was not delivered.… (altro)

A perfect horror book.
Wait.
What do you mean this isn't a horror book, it's only a romance?!

Perfected as a series would be a great Tender is The Flesh without a vegan metaphor clogging it up. Obviously Perfected doesn't have a pushed vegan metaphor, so it is a bit better, it's horror, but it keeps pushing itself as a romance and a growth of love between two people one of which you can't consent. Personally Tender is The Flesh is a really great horror book with a really muddied message and that's where this book also follows. If we remove the romance angle entirely this book would definitely be talked about in a different light.

Book two opens with Ella complaining about being in this basically a daycare for dogs, and the dog daycare is so good. There's ten other pets there, and they are each taken care of and lavished. They are happy! These pets are very loved, they have everything they could want. It's a perfect dog hotel. But still she laments about how it's a prison. Not sure how, but our main character has been really garbage, Ella doesn't know what kissing is or consent or any basic things that she thinks she's in prison.

I was starting to wonder if PETA would show up in this, this seems like a perfect world where we would get PETA. From what we get early on it sounds like PETA is just killing these guys and throwing them on the doorstep of scientist. Sounds about right for PETA. Except later it's revealed to be Marcus, a male pet who is trying to start a scandal by doing it. Male pets, like I suspected, do exist.

They're just labeled as creepy and perverted. Which doesn't make sense when everything down to freckle placement is controlled by the lab.

Ella gets mad at missy repeatedly. Missy bothers to help Ella out of the situation and slowly work her way sexually to help Missy have a better life. She trades her body so that Ella can have the means to get back home. Well Missy is doing this and sacrificing herself nobly, Ella is shaming her and telling her that she is a wrong person, and because Ella is the protagonist, Missy is in the wrong because of reasons. Not actual good reasons just because Ella says she's in the wrong.

Missy saves Ella's life another time.

She didn't scolds Ella for blowing their chance and in response Ella shames her and tells her basically where to put it for no reason other than Ella is a little brat, and can't appreciate Missy selling her body to further their goal and get them somewhere. If it's not clear, Missy is horribly mistreated in the series and does not deserve what's coming to her but the narration is pushing she deserves all of it.

Literally, Missy ashamed for selling her body just so Ella can get her selfish want of going back to her owners. She ashamed for not telling her that that is the only way and shame for doing that as if it is a horrible thing to actually work to sustain them and keep them alive.

Ella can choke on a rock.

I hate the atrocious Underground Railroad plotline in this series. These are white girls who are sold as pets/slaves but this series rehashes the actual Underground Railroad.

Oh and they emphasize they walk five feet away from the mother with deformed imperfect baby pets, and kill them right then and there. Among a place that's nothing but the ashes of dead babies and pets. This is still not a romantic horror or just a horror. It's only romance.

And It suffers for that horribly.

0 stars.

We're nothing if not consistently disgusting in this book series.… (altro)

Genetically perfected humans are being sold as pets. With that we have: eugenics! We've entered eugenics from the very first scene. So in conclusion we have: Eugenics. And. Slavery.

And it's called "Perfected".

Oh, this is going to be a trip to put my feelings about this book into words. This is a great horror but this is a ROMANCE.

The hottest craze among the top 1% has been human pets, that's the book's premise.

So, basically we push past the eugenics and slavery. What is there past that? This book is targeting young teenagers and so it both has really graphic content, but described very vaguely. For example there is pedophilia, there is infant murder, and there are things like rape, and the general sex trafficking one can expect in this kind of book.

Well these things are very disturbing, the book kind of glosses over them. They're there, but they're not fixated upon. People are pets and that's just how it is. People rape their pets and that's just how it is. It doesn't really go deeper into that most of the time. It is what it is and that's all it is.

Now to contradict myself further by saying both it is very graphic content and it is very vague and nondescript, it is also as gross as possible while not describing it enough. This book is all over the place. My review sounds like I'm constantly saying yes but no. Basically these topics are really nasty, the book does not detail them properly, but the book includes them so we have people who are raped and people who have their babies killed, but it's glossed over and played as no big deal.

I saw a few people saying this is a young adult Handmaid's Tale, it's very much the off-brand bootleg diet soda version of that. Minus a real political statement.

Thank Cthulhu that Canada canonically made breeding for these people and having them illegal.

The book uses the word "bred" so much it's uncomfortable. Especially since these are UNDERAGED girls grown in a lab.

"They look like twelve-year-olds."
"They're sixteen, I can assure you they're fully grown."
I just dry heaved.

"Charming, maybe if you're trying to recreate the old South." So they're aware of history enough to know what they look like they're doing and why Eight shouldn't be calling her buyer Master. This is so many layers of wrong. It's fully aware of that too.

He also sneaks into her room to put a collar on her "so she'll remember where she belongs". Squick.

The imperfect pets are sent back and taken to the "Red Room" and put down. So they're all aware they'll be put down and killed and have anxiety. They're striving to be perfect for their owners with the knowledge they will be killed if they are not.

I left out they're sterilized as people want them to be. If their owners decide it, they get their reproductive organs taken. Which given they're all females, this is a very big painful thing to deal unto them.

The Canada part mentioned above is a big Underground Railroad thing. History is big oofs in this book. They know and they still do this. How can they be so aware and so nonchalant at the same time?

0 stars.

It's marketed towards children! Don't let your children read this!… (altro)

This was a well executed book, but I ultimately couldn't buy premise.

I was wary about the idea of humans keeping other humans as pets, but curious, too. I wanted to hear the backstory. I wanted to hear how these pets were genetically engineered and what differences were made in their genetic code to make them pets. I wanted to know what society had defined being human as.

Alas, earwax. It seems to me like the only difference between Ella, a 'pet,' and an ordinary human was her appearance and her upbringing. I feel like any baby could eventually be turned into a pet given the right breeding.

But I continued, hoping I'd be proved wrong. Ella is initially very submissive, and very eager to do exactly as she's trained. I wanted to hear how she'd evolve, how she'd change, how she'd come to eventually want freedom. I figured she might read books, eavesdrop, and have intellectual conversations.

But instead, she just falls for a guy with a pretty face. And the romance in this book honestly kind of sickened me. As the blurb gives the romance away, I'll talk freely--Penn and Ella seem to have an instant physical attraction, and Penn's interest in Ella comes from her looks and her ability to play the piano with emotion. It seems like Penn's father's interest in Ella came from practically the same aspects, yet Penn despises his father. Where's the difference?

The romance happens incredibly fast. If it had built up steadily over a year or so, maybe I would have bought it. But it happens practically instantaneously. The weak, naive female protagonist needs to have a guy to show her what the world could be like. Lovely.

Throughout the book, since the premise hadn't really been explained, the idea of keeping people as pets just made me squirm. I thought I'd be okay with the premise because I thought it'd have much more explanation, but honestly I was in no way okay with the whole idea.

While this did have potential, I was pretty disappointed by this book.
… (altro)