I spent much of the rest of that night and the day after thinking about this, considering why this story connected with me so much, about why I came to care about Ampersand to the point of desperately wanting to read more about him. Once Demi had dropped her off at the Kaiser building downtown, Cora tried not to think about the Town Car, trudging through four hours of mind-numbing data entry during which, owing to company policy, she was not allowed any internet access. I was super engaged during the middle of the book where the human character have some pretty in-depth conversations. I'll cry at tv and film all the time, hell, half the stuff on the internet gets me; but a book has never gotten me like this. Tactful Translation: In her capacity as Ampersand's interpreter, Cora often smooths over some of his overly blunt comments that could be construed as insulting.

No Historical Figures Were Harmed: According to Ellis, Nils Ortega is functionally based on Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, although his personality is not. There will be sequels - the book is touted as the first in the Noumena sequence - but the book has a fair amount of closure to it and no immediate cliffhangers.Notorious Parent: Cora's father Nils Ortega is the single most wanted but influential man in the book's universe. But there were also times she came across as naive and foolish, and seemed to not really have her life together. The car was a manual transmission with a stick shift its previous owner had wrapped in duct tape years ago, a time bomb the color of expired baby food that should have gone off sooner than it did. The Fremda, who don't have the algorithm, don't know any English, not that most of them are interested in learning it anyway.

Grief-stricken Nikola starts taking intelligence-suppressing drugs again and goes from Tranquil Fury to homicidal rage to being left comatose after a somewhat unsuccessful murder-suicide. But I am so glad this was not only decent, but it quickly has become one of my favorite novels I've read this year. I feel like if I knew I was being spied on or phone tapped or followed, I wouldn’t even know how to function. Nils's daughter, Cora Sabino, is a young college dropout living with her mother and her two younger siblings in Southern California, where her paternal aunt Luciana, a former federal agent, also resides.Alternate History: Cora's 2007 goes quite a bit differently from the real one—after the two meteor strikes, her father releases a slew of classified documents and files, including, crucially, a recording that proves George W. Despite his heavy bearing on the plot, Nils never actually interacts with Cora in the novel and he never appears in person with his presence limited in the main plot to being talked about. The book ends with the two characters closer than ever, with an undeniable connection that's so akin to love that I couldn't see it any other way. Imagine transformers if it had been taken seriously and written and dealt with by an intelligent human being.

Though it does have a lot of hard sci-fi elements and my low attention span had trouble keeping up with some terms, the author does such a good job of driving the plot forward along with the characters that it kept me reading and enthralled. Cora had to grow up all of a sudden, she had to step up to responsibility and put herself in a position that would test her beyond her limits; and Ampersand, he had to learn that his initial opinions of humans were wrong, that we're not just violent, animalistic creatures, but were worthy of his attention a,nd care. I just really enjoyed that entire scene and it feels good that Ellis let's you draw conclusions yourself without spelling things out in text. This isn't a girl falling in love with a vampire or a zombie because he's a hot boy, or even something resembling a boy.Their otherworldly connection will change everything she thought she knew about being humanand could unleash a force more sinister than she ever imagined. Relationship Reveal: Ampersand is revealed to be symphyles (essentially an amygdaline counterpart to mates) with Ĉefo, who died prior to the novel's events, and Obelus, who is The Heavy of the story. Ampersand sees no issue with lying to Cora if he believes it to be in his interest or in hers, has no regrets over damaging the brains of humans through experimentation, and has little respect for human life in general.

While life could exist in some hypothetical distant galaxy, the expansion of the universe means that humans and amygdalines have no hope of finding it without developing Faster-Than-Light Travel. Starfish Aliens: The amygdalines look like dragon-mantis-velociraptor hybrids (sort of), with skin textured like canvas, and they speak either through the vents in the sides of their neck, through a sort of telepathy, or through the incredibly intimate High Language. Her father was interesting as well, if not as a character I would like to have as a parent, he's an interesting character in fiction though.He was interesting, but he was so hostile and terse that I found myself, like Cora I assume, more interested in the answers that came from him about his species, language, and people than himself as a person. Cora’s feeling of horror that this was even happening quickly hopped to embarrassment before settling onto her old standby: numbness. Cora and the alien strike a wary alliance, as Cora wants to reunite with her abducted family members while the alien needs a human interpreter. Obelus overpowers and severely wounds both Cora and the Genome before they are transported away by Ampersand. Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Obelus badly wounds Cora before she, Ampersand, and the Genome can escape in one of the autonomous plates.