I picked up
What’s Left of Me because the premise
sounded interesting. Each person is born with two souls in the same body, but
usually one of these gains dominance by the time they turn ten, and the other
one disappears. For Eva and Addie, this doesn’t happen, and they have to live
in fear of being discovered, because Hybrids are considered dangerous. It’s a
bit Divergent-like, if Divergent was less interesting and the
main character even more dull. Yeah. It also starts a trilogy of its own, called The Hybrid Trilogy.
The main
character is Eva, who is the recessive soul in her body, the one who was to
disappear but never did, putting herself and her sister, the dominant soul in
danger. I couldn’t tell you much about Eva even if I tried. She hasn’t been in
control of her own body for years and doesn’t have any interests, either. Addie
likes drawing, Addie is level-headed, Eva is just there. While it was
interesting to see how the recessive soul saw a world she didn’t interact with,
she also made for an incredibly dull protagonist.
I was also annoyed with Eva because she knows that in order to protect herself, Addie and their whole family, they have to pretend they've settled - that she has disappeared. Does she do this? No, because freedom is more important than everything else. At a very crucial moment when she's ruined everything, she starts laughing. It's these kinds of things that just didn't make me like her all that much.
The book
can be easily separated into two parts by looking at the setting and the
pacing, and neither of them did much for me. The first part I was waiting for
the other shoe to drop and when it did, I didn’t become very invested. Also,
interestingly, the book has zero important characters who aren’t Hybrids, which
also reminded me of Divergent;
“People like me are rare and dangerous but everyone and my love interest is one
of them.” Dull. I would’ve preferred at least for the here unnamed – this is
for spoiler reasons – love interest to be “normal” and not “super special
awesome” in the same way the main character is, for a more dynamic story.
The writing
style isn’t bad but it’s also not good. There’s a lot of disinteresting
description and going in circles around the same issues. What’s Left of Me also doesn’t have those beautiful thoughts about
life that I often look for in books. Even the parts that I thought were good
were only so in context and when I tried to pick a favourite, I ended up pretty
much deleting all my highlights because they were so dull. Bleh.
There were
some discoveries Eva and Addie made about Hybrids towards the end that were
definitely interesting in their own right, but I as wasn’t very invested in the
story itself, they didn’t really make a difference to me. Also, can I just say
how unrealistic I thought it was that American kids get taught about an
American war pretty much every year? I thought they were sheltered beyond
common sense from everything they might find frightening. Whatever.
What’s Left of Me
wasn’t completely terrible – especially in the beginning I was hopeful it would
be a book I could actually like – but it wasn’t good, either. Kind of sucks to
leave Addie and Eva (and all the characters who were so disinteresting I
already forgot their names) where they are, but I won’t be picking up the other
two books in this trilogy.