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A review by tmdavis
Skinned by Robin Wasserman
4.0
Lia Kahn is beautiful and popular until the accident that takes her life. Lia wakes up to find that she has been downloaded into a new body that only looks human. Lia will never feel pain again, she will never age, and she can't ever truly die. But because she is now a "mech" she is rejected by her friends, betrayed by her boyfriend, and alienated from her old life. Forced to the fringes of society, Lia finds and joins others like her. But they are looked at as freaks and they are hated and feared. They are everything but human.
Very interesting premise in many ways--that there are extremists who believe that mechs should not have the same rights as humans, that Lia's friends and family respond to her differently than before because they can't reconcile the new Lia with the old Lia. It reminded me a lot of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series.
The most interesting part to me was that the download process was not as simple as inserting Lia's memories into another body. Lia's accident was so sudden that if her parents had not decided to download she would have died. So Lia ends up in a body that looks nothing like her. There was no time to customize the body to look like Lia so while the memories are the same, the body is different. On top of that, Lia spends a lot of time rehabilitating herself because she must learn to speak, walk, and control her body again.
When Lia becomes friends with Auden, a boy whose father is against mechs to the extreme her life (such as it is) suddenly becomes interesting again. Hopefully the second two books in the series will be just as good.
Narrator Kate Reinders was fabulous.
Very interesting premise in many ways--that there are extremists who believe that mechs should not have the same rights as humans, that Lia's friends and family respond to her differently than before because they can't reconcile the new Lia with the old Lia. It reminded me a lot of Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series.
The most interesting part to me was that the download process was not as simple as inserting Lia's memories into another body. Lia's accident was so sudden that if her parents had not decided to download she would have died. So Lia ends up in a body that looks nothing like her. There was no time to customize the body to look like Lia so while the memories are the same, the body is different. On top of that, Lia spends a lot of time rehabilitating herself because she must learn to speak, walk, and control her body again.
When Lia becomes friends with Auden, a boy whose father is against mechs to the extreme her life (such as it is) suddenly becomes interesting again. Hopefully the second two books in the series will be just as good.
Narrator Kate Reinders was fabulous.