Thank you NetGalley and Trobador for giving me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

As much as I hate to say it, this book was absolutely awful. I was originally very excited about the premise and it sounded incredibly interesting, especially as a reader with a good understanding of genetics and DNA. It was incredibly unfortunate that the writing of this novel was not good at all.

Meant to be fiction, this book was written more like a non-fiction, with the only fictional part about this being the character’s name thrown into every paragraph. This book was essentially just 300+ pages of information on biogenetics. If you ignored the fact it was fiction and treated it more like a NF book, it still wouldn’t have been great as there was little-to-no structure to the information and subjects were all over the place. Additionally, the writing was very clunky and everything may have been written in bullet points.

Onto the MC, Susie, who was as flat as a pancake (as in not a 3D character personality-wise) and other than her job, all I could tell you about her was that she was always drinking Earl Grey Tea. Every single page was just about her drinking tea and researching, then telling you this research. There was no plot essentially, and I now understand why the only other reviews of this book were DNFs because it was such a struggle for me to finish this.

Finally, I was aware it was meant to mention the COVID-19 Pandemic and the links with that and biogenetics, such as man-made viruses etc, but tell me why there were about 100+ pages listing all the events of the pandemic. I wasn’t sure how this added to the story as readers are probably slightly knowledgeable on how governments handled it etc. The book didn’t even mention the impacts of this on the MC, which would have added a little depth to the plot.

I dislike giving such negative reviews, but I really could not tell you one good thing about this book, it was incredibly dull even with the information on biogenetics. I personally got absolutely nothing from this book and for me it was a complete waste of time.

Um, ok. I had to double check that this was meant to be a novel, rather than a rough draft of a sort of white paper or thesis for a class. At 75 pages in, almost nothing had happened, except that Susie has freaked out because some men are following her twitter account. There is so much unnecessary inf-dumping and so little plot, dialogue, character development, and so little of the storytelling I generally expect in any novel. I have the education background to enjoy a novel centered around genomics, but this manuscript needs a lot more editing before I could get much out of it that I couldn't read more accessibly and enjoyably from a textbook. I am sure with a lot of not-too-gentle massaging this could turn into an interesting and even entertaining novel, but it is not there yet.

I want to thank you for the advanced opportunity to read this book. I was unable to finish reading I got 15 percent through the book and it is truly not for me . I felt more like I was reading non-fiction data analysis and the parts relating to the fictional character were very random and all over the place. I could not get into the story , the character , or the book. The cover is appealing and the description sounded like something I typically read and can get into but this book just wasn’t my cup of tea . Thank you for the opportunity . I would give it 1/5 stars .