Created
in a laboratory, Elysia is intended to be the perfect teenaged
girl: polite, obedient and lovely. As most clones are adults,
Elysia is a beta, a test model. Elysia knows she was replicated
from a dead teenaged girl, but she's not supposed to have
any of her original's memories or emotions. Only she does.
This is a secret that could get her tortured and killed. She's
a clone, nothing more than property. She has no rights, no
protection – just a burning desire to be free. The casually
heartless, pampered humans in Beta's world are both unsettling
and completely believable. We fall in love with Beta when
she is new and struggling to be "good" and continue
to root for her when she throws off that "goodness"
-- the first person narrative shows us Elysia's slow realization
about her world, even while it lets us jump ahead emotionally
and find this place horrifying. The novel's action is compelling
and more than a little scary. This is the first in a series,
and although it has a satisfying feel in terms of wrapping
up on stage in Elysia's life, it ends on an amazing twist
that will keep readers looking avidly forward to the next
piece of Elysia's story.
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