What's Left of Me by Kat ZhangMy rating: 2 of 5 stars
I had really high hopes for this story - which is probably why I'm so disappointed. It's not always good to go into a book that's recommended expecting to like it.
The premise for this story is great. Two souls are born into every one body. By the time the person is around 10 years old, they "settle" and one of the souls becomes more dominant and the other fades. Sometimes both souls stay intact, and those people are referred to as hybrids. Hybrids, although common throughout the world, threaten the American society and when discovered are sent to psychiatric institutions to be healed. Drugs and surgery are involved. And of course this is a bad thing that must be stopped and the government overthrown.
The story is told from the point of view of Eva, who is the non-dominant soul in the body where Addie is dominant. Eva hasn't faded completely although she doesn't have any motor control of the body they share. Addie is clearly the dominant soul and the person that everyone sees. Eva starts out as shy and hesitant, becoming stronger as the book progresses. The way her character develops is steady, but this is probably due to the fact that we hear the story from her perspective. Addie clearly loves her other half but isn't consistent. While she's supposed to be dominant, she seems to acquiesce to Eva pretty easily. Maybe it's natural to the story for her to recede a bit, but it seemed that her character developed backward. The idea here was to even things out so that both characters had equal control of the body (as did several of the side characters). But it just didn't work for me.
None of the side characters were well-developed, which was a shame. This is probably due to the fact that the premise dictates that each person is really two people, which meant there were a lot of characters. By the end, it got a bit tricky trying to keep track of which ones were connected.
Does all this sound complicated? It was. And that's the biggest downfall of this book for me. It just tried to be too many things.
As to the plot, we have Eva/Addie dealing with life in a psychiatric hospital. There were so many inconsistencies here that I just lost interest after awhile. The hospital is apparently a cross between a boarding school, a prison and a psych ward. But apparently the kids in it were able to fool guards and get away with a lot of running around. In a secure facility? There were nurses and guards everywhere, but they were all adults and they were all pretty stupid. The suspense of the breaking into and breaking out of and general sneaking around was very weak, and this because the adults were painted as bumbling bad guys. There's a mad scientist-type, a sympathetic/conflicted woman doctor, several nondescript board members and one bad guy. The bad guy was seemingly some kind of government official. Even Eva/Addie's parents betrayed her, which should have been heart-wrenching. Instead it was just bland because the relationship between them was so watery.
Things built to a big climax (albeit unbelievably) and then just fell flat. There's the hint of a romance, but it didn't make any sense at all since there were two people in each body. In fact, the idea that two people had to get along in one body was just never really fully explored. There was the hint of a look at this problem through the eyes of Eva and Addie, but only a hint. There just weren't enough internal conversations combined with actions to flesh it out. The action scenes just weren't believable; the big showdown was shallow and the post-climactic scenes were without direction.
The one word that stands out to me with this book is bland. It's like a watered down version of a good dystopian. It's so disappointing because it had such great potential. It may get better with the successive books in the series, but not for me, especially when I struggled to finish this one. I need my stories rich and diverse and this was just the imitation of one, all appearance and no depth.
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