One of my top ten pet peeves occurred in the first eleven pages: changing tense in the same sentence. Paragraph is bad enough, but sentence? Gah! Another one of my top ten was glaring throughout. I hate, Hate, HATE it when authors beat you over the head with a particular idea or plot detail that they are terrified you are too stupid to grasp and they feel is imperative to their story. It's demeaning, repetitive and BORING... we get it already, shut UP! The editing was also a bit rubbish, not that I was surprised given the state of such things these days, but it was bad enough to warrant mentioning. Character development was haphazard at best. The only physical description of Colton was "toned" and that was three quarters of the way in. What's up with that? Isn't he the love interest? How can you never describe, at all, the love interest? Come to think of it, there is absolutely no description of Hayden either and Emile is only ever mentioned to be "blond". Uh, huh...I'm all for having your own picture in your mind's eye what a character looks like, but surely the author has some idea of her characters in her head. Isn't it usual for her to share that with the rest of us? Isn't that the point of her writing HER book? Just a thought...

Having said all of that, the book was free, and I was attached enough to the Colton and Hayden characters to pay $5 for the entire series including those (in my opinion) ridiculous mini books (1.5, 2.5 and the like) so it gets two stars rather than one. I'm not sure when I'll get around to reading on though. I don't find the idea all that appealing just now. But, Sobon got my five bucks, so she should feel good about that. ( )

Emile is walking home one day when she is struck down by a car and killed by Vesta Life employees. They take her body back to the facility and place wires and computers inside, so that she looks like a human on the outside, but is machine on the inside. With the help of her brother, she escapes Vesta Life and tries to survive on the run.

I liked the premise of this book, but there were a few things that completely threw me off. The characters, for one, don't ring true. When Emile runs away, she bumps into (almost literally) a boy named Colton, who is standing in the middle of the road, about to give up his life. She feels sorry for him and takes him with her to her new safehouse. I found Colton's reasons for being suicidal a little shaky, and his personality and situation just doesn't seem desperate enough to drive him to take his own life. (And his choice of suicide is being run over by a car? Really? But that's another matter.) They also laugh and smirk during situations where it seems inappropriate (to me, at least). And not the I-laugh-in-the-face-of-danger kind of laugh, but a weird, almost creepy laugh. For example, Colton laughs after telling Emile he cleaned up most of the mess after killing a couple of Vesta Life employees, and almost immediately afterwards his eyes light up in horror after discovering that he forgot to clean and hide the knife. That's weird, right? A lot of these people are quick to cry, too. I can't even remember how many times I read the phrase "so-and-so's eyes filled with tears".

I'm curious about how the people are able to put previous personalities onto hard drives. I don't understand how they're able to make the transition from a human mind to a computer program, and it seems a little too hard to believe. Barring that leap of logic, I liked the struggle between Emile and Thirteen, but in the end the weak characters prevented me from liking this book. ( )