Elijah-Co

Great read! Definitely a nail biter!! Highly recommend! I feel like this is the perfect intro book to science fiction for those who may want to try the genre!

I had really high expectations for this book and I was actually finding it quite interesting and enjoyable at first.
I was quite interested in the plot and characters and the science side of it all, but towards the end the book seemed to tail.off quite quickly, I found it very anti climatic and thought it lacked drama and excitement.
Everything seemed pulled together really quickly, especially the last couple of pages.
Personally I was disappointed, but this is just my opinion and I'm sure many people will really enjoy it!

I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in return for an honest review.

The Good:
The premise was very intriguing. I really love book that explore immortality, or in this case amortality, which is just living without aging. I also enjoyed that it was very scientific, at least at the beginning before the "fiction" portion started. The main character is a cancer researcher, and I liked that reading from his perspective. The fact that it was written by an actual doctor as well made it better.

The Bad
Pretty much everything else. This book had way, way too much conversation that was not needed. It did a poor job of explaining what was actually going on. It was fast paced but the ending felt like nothing of actual consequence happened. And the way the characters talked was beyond annoying. I felt like I was back in high school listening to cringey flirting.

Lars, the MC also made some incredibly questionable decisions that I hope scientists don't make in real life. The company he worked for was very amoral, and I get that morality was explored in this book as a grey area, but I just didn't like that aspect. Overall, for such an exciting sounding subject of amortality, it fell very flat and the ending didn't really lead anywhere. It just sort of ended.

2/5 Thank you to Net Galley and the author for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.

This is a difficult review to write. The writing is not bad, but I have credibility issues with the character development and research procedures.

Lars, the lead, is written as a good university researcher; an ethical, upstanding guy; yet he gets involved with an unknown, super rich, company with two unknown drugs and readily agrees to be the primary researcher with little information. He easily signs everything they offer and continues to be blindsided by their updates and decisions without complaint. How could Lars be a good, loving, honourable academic and be so naïve?

He then proceeds to use the research drug on his wife, without signing her up for the study (which isn’t at the human stage anyway), and without her informed consent. It seems that if he had been written as having a bipolar issue or an evil underside, things might be more believable. His amicable wife, also a scientist; doesn’t seem to have any issues being the guinea pig when she eventually finds out that he injected her with a research drug. To add to this, his wife has some good effects from the drug which don’t seem to be followed, studied, or properly documented; and Lars proceeds to give it to other people: a doctor friend’s husband and the dean of the university. All of these supposed “good” people go along with this break in research protocol and decide to keep things quiet. Is no one concerned about legalities, possible unknown side effects, or long term effects of new injected or inhaled drugs?

Also, throughout the story, people who seem to question what the company is doing, seem to conveniently die. This is explained as not the company’s fault outright. The company applied pressure and each person died as a result of their own stress: overdrinking and driving while not wearing a seatbelt, or falling into a drunken stupor in a closed garage with the car running, or inadvertently tripping in front of a moving van. This is too fishy to be believable.

The basic concept of the story is interesting and might make a good television series, but the book sort of fell flat. Amortality research could be a very exciting subject. I easily read through the whole book, looking for a good twist at the end, which did not come. Lars seemed to have second thoughts about his, and the company’s, wrong doings and wanted to come clean; but it wasn’t clear what he ended up doing. Is the ending supposed to be a set up for another book? There were so many loose ends that I was left dissatisfied with the story.

I have mixed feelings about this book. The writer himself is a doctor, and this is his first book to be published. The basic concept is good, interesting. However, I have problems with the implementation. Lars is the protagonist who, along with his wife, represents morality in principle. However, this only appears in words, in reality they do nothing against unethical attempts and murders, and even accept them as a necessary evil. The story of the book is built on dialogues that are pretty boring, uninteresting, and don’t sound like we’re talking in real life. The characters are not sympathetic, and whoever they might be, they will soon die under suspicious circumstances.

But the basic concept is interesting, sometimes it’s good to dream about how good it would be if we could live forever and if it only took one injection to be young again. The writer probably has his own experience of how experimenting and testing such a drug would work, but I felt quite a bit of professionalism in the procedure.

Despite the problems described above, I have read through the book, which is a positive. But it was more because of my patience, not because the story was so exciting. And in vain I waited in the end for the big twist or to get a proper finish. The end of the book seems cluttered, it made me more upset.

If the writer were to rewrite the book with the help of a professional editor, there could be a chance of success being a good book that is worth reading.