Looking For a Good Book

Ingredients for teenage girl YA:

Teen girl protagonist – check.

A true love – check.

A death of someone close to teen girl protagonist – check.

No one understands teen girl protagonist, creating lots of angst – check.

Girl must fight hard for acceptance and no one can possibly understand girl – check.

It’s all here, bit by bit, with a few twists to keep it fresh.  The biggest twist? (Read no further if you want to be completely surprised [though it happens early in the book]…) The death of someone close…?  It’s the girl herself who dies.

It is the future.  Machines have taken over, not because they have evil intent, but because they are programmed in such a way that they can no longer be manipulated by the imperfect human race and seek only peace and perfection (which of course humanity can not provide).  And so some humans, including our protagonist Rhona Long, fight back against the machines in resistance groups.  But on one outing, Rhona is killed.  She wakes up in a hospital, all her memories intact, in a cloned body.  But even though this is all on the up-and-up, most who knew her before are hesitant to trust her.

Given the genre and the stereotypical YA tropes, I managed to enjoy a lot of this book.  Author Hayley Stone manages to move the story along quickly, never getting too caught up in the drama, the pathos, of the character, while still managing to provide all the necessary yearning and angst to keep the typical YA reader happy.

I think that if the book hadn’t moved along as smoothly and as quickly as it did, it would have lost me as a reader.  This book is really about Rhona and her relationships and her not being accepted – the war against the machines is just the backdrop.  But that backdrop, and Stone’s writing, is what will bring me back to the next book, despite the YA nature.

Looking for a good book?  Machinations is a dystopian YA book by Hayley Stone, heavy on the YA sensibility, that is a quick read that will likely keep the reader entertained.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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Machinations

author: Hayley Stone

series: Machinations #1

publisher: Hydra

ISBN: 039959437X

ebook, 343 pages