The minute I heard about this book and saw the cover, I immediately wanted to read it. The premise sounded amazing, and I couldn't wait to get started, but I was a little disappointed in the end. It is a very slow read at the beginning, and I really pushed myself to read on but it didn't quite hit the spot for me in the end. Very interesting book, but I didn't love it as I had hoped.

The path to immortality is littered with messy mortality and morality and it makes for a great story.

It’s the future. Not too far in the future but we’ve got ‘lifers’, a select few who have been around for hundreds of years and are on a path to immortality (shout out to technology) and we’ve got the others who just live and die as we would. Among this select few are people like Lea, she is ‘good’, maintains herself and her health by eating nutripacks and doing all the dull things she’s supposed to do. It hardly seems like much of a life. Then there are people like Anja who has seen just how bad living for hundreds of years can be as she watches her ‘misaligned’ mother simply exist, her fake heart beating life into her shell of a body. Anja is part of the Suicide Club, a bunch of lifers who no longer want to live and take matters into their own hands. They are ‘anti-sanct’ and the enemy. When Lea’s dad, a lifer too, comes back into town things start to get interesting…

It’s a good read, packed with ideas - mortality, morality, technology, health/wellness, a life vs living - and it’ll make a good film. But what I loved is that the female characters are so messy and I know that’s probably not the real takeaway but I AM HERE FOR IT.

Thanks Netgalley for approving my request for this. I found the cover and premise intriguing and couldn’t wait to start :)
Set in a dystopian future this follows Lea, a lifer, who steps onto the road and gets hit by car when she spots her father. Her accident is misconstrued as a suicide attempt because Lea can’t tell anyone she saw her father – a wanted criminal. She’s placed under observation and sent to a support group where she meets Anya, a member of the terrorist organisation ‘Suicide Club.’ Being under observation risks the chance that Lea might not be approved for the third wave, a new technology advancement that will make you an Immortal…
This had potential, however unfortunately for me I felt the plot didn’t really go anywhere, found the ending anticlimactic and struggled to emotionally engage with Lea who I found dull. This is well written with some interesting ideas and themes, however the story is rather slow paced.

An exploration of a dystopian world set in future New York in which life expectancy has vastly increased for certain members of society, being immortal is within grasp for a select few. The subject matter of this books is really interesting and ambitious, massive ideas, both in terms of medical ethics and existentialism, but it never becomes unwieldy in the hands of the author. The use of dual narrators is helpful here, rounding out what could otherwise end up feeling a bit Brave New World-y. Treatment of family is handled particularly well, and one of the most appealing parts of the book for me. It was a compulsive read, well-paced, whilst still feeling like the narrative and characters had space to breathe.

In a world of falling birth rates people aim to live as long as possible - they go for regular check-ups to ensure their Nutripack diets, low-impact exercise and stress levels aren’t having a negative impact on their health. After all, the Government are reportedly rolling out Third Wave Immortality any day now and who will be healthy enough to be chosen for it? Lea thinks she is the perfect candidate, until her past catches up with her and she falls into the dark world of The Suicide Club.

In many ways, Suicide Club falls into a lot of clichés in the dystopian Sci-Fi genre. Lea starts out to be the model-citizen in the bizarre future world but when she starts to see the world through different eyes she realises that everything is not as perfect as it appears. The one difference in this book as opposed to many others like it is that this is not an action packed, world ending conclusion – just something that impacts the main characters.

The concept of living forever, and how far we go to live a healthy life in detriment to enjoying it and living it to its fullest is a great premise. It’s also a world that is not so far away from our own society with devices like Fitbits, healthy eating fads and apps to tell you to drink more water or when to stretch already a reality. Although I quite enjoyed the book, I agree with other reviewers that perhaps there was a bit of a missed opportunity for more of the story to be developed. I also found myself wanting to find out more about the world itself – for example, the algorithm to determine how long someone has to live at birth was referenced a lot but I didn’t really understand how it was calculated, the Third Wave was also mentioned a lot with perhaps more sinister undertones but nothing more was explored, even Lea’s work for the HealthTech company sounded interesting but wasn’t really fully explained. Perhaps this is because Suicide Club at its heart is a story focused on its two main characters and about family, death and letting go rather than changing a regime or saving the world.

The book changes perspectives between Lea and Anja, the main characters and also explores flash-backs from their history as well. I enjoyed the changes in narrative and didn’t find any of it particularly confusing. However Lea’s violent tendencies which are explored in the flash-backs, seem to be at odds with her character in the present. You perhaps don’t get introduced to the life-loving first version of Lea for long enough before the first incident occurs to realise this.

Overall I enjoyed Suicide Club although I felt there was definitely scope to increase the story in places. The world was very interesting and it left me with a lot of unanswered questions, wanting to find out more. Thank you to NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the opportunity to read Suicide Club in exchange for an honest review.

I would like to thank Hodder & Stoughton and Rachel Heng for sending me this ARC via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.

Suicide Club didn't offer many positives for me other than I really liked the concept of the dystopian world. People obsessed with living "forever", abiding by certain rules such as what food they can or can not eat, particular workouts, and of course, obtaining as many body enhancements as they can. Dying has pretty much become a crime.

This made me think about how we are so consumed with trying to live a particular lifestyle in the hopes that we can remain young and beautiful. I enjoyed the darkness of it - I certainly would not want to live forever and would not want to lose that control over my life.

There was a good amount of POC characters in the story, such as our main character Lea.

Unfortunately, I found the story was dreadfully slow paced. At one point I thought I might DNF, though I persisted and managed to finish it. Though I like the world building, I found it so painfully repetitive, talking about details I already knew, I desperately wanted the story to move forward. Which it barely did.

This book was not as action based as I thought. The main conflict is based on two groups of people - the Suicide Club and sub-100's. Sub-100's will live a normal life, unlike "lifers" so they will eventually die. Their lives are average and treated as such. The Suicide Group mainly lifers, want to take back the control of their lives; being able to decide when they want to die.

It was mainly all talk and no play. When I thought the conflict would finally kick off, nothing. Dullville; it was a massive letdown.

I couldn't stand the main character, Lea. There were times where I thought she might become interesting, but I can only describe her as a monster. She was boring and dull. I prefer the secondary character Anja, who was interesting with slightly more depth to her.

Overall this book was massively disappointing. If you don't mind a slow paced story, an unlikeable main character with barely any action - then this book is for you!

Thank you to Netgally and Hodder & Stoughton for the e-arc

I DNF'd this at 52%

This book comes out in July 2018, and I read this is February, so the final copy may change.

I requested this on a whim, I loved the cover, the premise was interesting, and it wasn't super long. The cover gave me the feeling of something exciting, zazzy, and futuristic. I was expecting, from the premise of a world where immortality is fast approaching and a club that fights against the restrictions on life to achieve that, would start with the mundane and grow exciting or something. I was wrong.

Plot

For the first 20%, I was interested. It wasn't fast-paced, but I can take a slow build up. The writing was interesting and there was a couple of planted pieces of intrigue that kept me going. However, when it never picked up by 40%- I was worried. The novel started to get vrepetitive, re-enforcing what we already knew, and continuing to not move onto something more interesting.

And the drama of her past, which we experienced in flashbacks, felt somewhat out of place in amoungst the rest of the inane/non-existent plot.

It took until half way through for the Suicide Club to actually come into play, and by then I'd completely lost interest.

Characters

The characters had a lot of inane conversations that didn't feel like they were going anywhere, with a lot of boring details inserted around them, making most scenes after the set-up pretty dry.

I couldn't say the characters where flat, I did feel they had dimension, but they were just super boring. I found them all bland and had to read about by the half-way point, and when there wasn't even an exciting plot going on- it left more to be desired.

World

The world was well set-up. Giving us a sense of how and why the world became the way it is as shown in the novel, and has very little info-dumping. The integration of the knowledge of this world was good.

Part of the flaw of living in order to have a long life was the restrictions of food you could eat. So meat and desserts were cut from the diet. The problem I had with this was if you were 100 years old, and had never had ice-cream in the past, or hadn't for a long time- would you even like it? The character, upon eating it, was instantly like: This is delicious, and devours it- but I wasn't convinced.
There's also a point she see's meat- and salivates at the sight of it- which I thought was far fetched. I'm vegetarian, and have been since I was 8 years old, and I have no desire to eat meat, and if I tried it now I probably wouldn't like it- especially not something like a steak (which was what she was salivating over- of dreaming of eating). It was like the author was pushing her own feelings on food onto her character, rather than considering what would be more realistic.


Overall

This had a good start but got boring by the 40% mark as nothing happened.
I did skip to the end and read the last few chapters, and I'm glad I did. I felt like I wasn't reading anything I wouldn't have expected, and when I didn't care for the characters it all felt inane. Even the Suicide Club itself sounded really boring in the way it was presented within the story. (and I thought it was more about living life the way you want even if you have a shorter lifespan- which is what I thought from the synopsis- not about literal suicide).

In the end, this just wasn't the book for me. Maybe if you like quieter, more introspective novels, and don't care for striking characters or fast-paced plots, then this could appeal to you, or make you think more than it made me think. It just wasn't what I was expecting when picking this up.

I was instantly drawn to the premise of this book, as a big fan dystopian stories, I really wanted to enjoy this but unfortunately I struggled with the book. I found the switching from past and present quite confusing and the characters were fairly difficult to warm to. I liked the idea but don’t feel it was delivered as well as it could have been.

Suicide Club is a near-future dystopian novel about a society that has nearly found the path to immortality, but only for an elite few. Lea has a high-powered job, fantastic health, and hasn’t eaten sugar in decades. She is a prime candidate for whatever is being planned for the next wave of life-enhancing work. However, a chance encounter with her past brings her into a new world: that of people less fortunate than her, and then into the orbit of the Suicide Club, a group fighting back against the system of life that has overtaken America.

In many ways, the novel feels like a textbook near-future sci-fi type dystopia, featuring body enhancements and technology, an observation list, and a black market on the outskirts of society. The concept behind the novel is dark, but the narrative itself isn’t as hard-hitting as might be expected. The protagonist has a complicated past over which her charmed present is only a veneer, and she is an interesting character, particularly with her destructive urges.

This is a solid dystopian novel with female main characters and a thoughtful concept, and it has similarities with some of Margaret Atwood’s novels and a hint of Black Mirror as well. However, it never quite feels distinctive or engaging enough, even at its darkest moments.