Artificial - Jadah McCoy - Mel's Bookshelf

Artificial (The Kepler Chronicles #1) – Jadah McCoy

(3.3 / 5)

I enjoyed this Young/New adult dystopian tale. I thought the cover was well designed and the synopsis grabbed me. It has amazing ratings on GoodReads so I was excited to be approved for a review copy.

Syl and her friends are survivors on Kepler, a colony of future Earth. By day they scavenge for food in the dilapidated city. By night they hide underground, away from the genetically engineered “Cull”, bug-like humanoid creatures intent on devouring everything in their path. Syl is kidnapped by Androids and is genetically altered, beginning to transform into one of the cull. She is rescued by an android with emotions named Bastion, who attempts to help her and the other humans who have been captured.

I really enjoyed the start of this novel. It began with a bang, and non stop action. I was enthralled! However after Syl gets kidnapped it lost a lot of its momentum for me. The storyline was still interesting, but it just lost the spark from the first part of the novel.

I liked the format of the chapters, alternating between Syl and Bastion’s point of view.

I didn’t really gel with the characters. Syl, and some things she did annoyed me and the romantic tension thing that was between her and Bastion was totally weird and I wasn’t feeling it at all.

There were some good twists and turns and the ending was not what I was expecting. There was a heap of action and a fair bit of blood and gore which was good. I liked the cull creatures. They weren’t in it as much as I was expecting in this one, I can only imagine that there will be more of them in subsequent books.

I will be interested to see how the series develops following that ending. It left a lot of questions that I would like to know the answer to!