Blogtour Review: The Body Electric – Beth Revis

*I received a free copy of The Body Electric from Scripturient Books via Xpresso Booktours. This has in no way influenced my voluntary review, which is honest and unbiased *

The Body Electric by Beth Revis
Published by Scripturient Books on 6 October 2014
Genres: Dystopian, Science Fiction, Young Adult
Pages: 482
Source: Xpresso Booktours
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The future world is at peace.

Ella Shepherd has dedicated her life to using her unique gift—the ability to enter people’s dreams and memories using technology developed by her mother—to help others relive their happy memories.

But not all is at it seems.

Ella starts seeing impossible things—images of her dead father, warnings of who she cannot trust. Her government recruits her to spy on a rebel group, using her ability to experience—and influence—the memories of traitors. But the leader of the rebels claims they used to be in love—even though Ella’s never met him before in her life. Which can only mean one thing…

Someone’s altered her memory.

Ella’s gift is enough to overthrow a corrupt government or crush a growing rebel group. She is the key to stopping a war she didn’t even know was happening. But if someone else has been inside Ella’s head, she cannot trust her own memories, thoughts, or feelings.

So who can she trust?

Welcome to my stop on The Body Electric tour hosted by Xpresso Booktours. I have my review and some favorite quotes to share, and there’s also a tour-wide giveaway from today until January 26th.

My The Body Electric review:

Ella is a young girl who has lost so much already, her dad died in an explosion, and her mom is terminally ill. Every night, Ella has very strange dreams, in which she finds herself with her father, and more often than not, he tells her something important, up until the point when Ella realizes that her dream is in fact not real. The Body Electric starts out really strong, I am drawn into Ella’s dreams and reality, and I want to know what is really going on. She is an attaching character, and she seems to be able to see things others can’t distinguish at all, especially when it comes to androids and what makes them so different from actual human beings.

For the first part of The Body Electric, I was completely immersed in the story, and even if it was quite slow paced, I thought it fitted the world and Ella’s worries perfectly. After the mid-point, though, the story started to drag a little for me, and sometimes I found the foreshadowing to be a little heavy-handed. Ella seemed to have to either live through or dream somethings more than once before it actually registered for her that she needed to take some action, and this was in opposition to what I thought I knew about her from the beginning of the story.

The cast of characters in The Body Electric is well done, though, and I really enjoyed Ella, Jack, Julie, Xavier and others, as they were well fleshed out and had a part to play in the overall plot. And the plot is very interesting, there is the ethical implications of using androids, trying to make robots that can actually think for themselves, and a president who is willing to do almost anything to make sure there will never be war again.

As the story went on, and especially towards the very end, it was a little rushed, and this was not necessary for a book that is almost five hundred pages long. Especially because from the middle until close to the end, it was slow, and some things could possible have been done differently to rather make the ending a little more satisfying. The writing is good, and I enjoyed the fact that it is mostly from Ella’s point of view, either in first person or in third person, present tense.

All in all, I enjoyed The Body Electric, and that is in big part thanks to Ella and Jack. The way they met, and all of Ella’s confusion was well done, and the overall plot was both surprising and quite well executed. The philosophical way of thinking about several things also spoke to me, and made me like what I was experiencing through Ella’s eyes.

Some of my favorite The Body Electric quotes:

 “Its the Azure Window,” I breathe staring at this natural wonder. It’s not. Not really. “Eyes are the window to the soul, Ella, don’t forget that,” Dad says.

Every effort has been made to design android faces to look as human as possible. But the more they try to make the robots look human, the more I’m unnerved by the little things that remind me they’re not.

I remember thinking that although the body looked like Dad, it wasn’t, not really. The thing in the casket wore his face, but not his life. 

When I asked who it was, the android gave me a name. I am more than a name. I feel, I think, therefore I am. Right?

The Body Electric giveaway:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

About Beth Revis

[dropshadowbox align=”none” effect=”lifted-both” width=”450px” height=”” background_color=”#e0c0d7″ border_width=”2″ border_color=”#674ea7″ ]AUTHOR BIO: Beth Revis is the NY Times bestselling author of the Across the Universe series. The complete trilogy is now available in more than 20 languages. A native of North Carolina, Beth’s most recent book is The Body Electric, which tells the story of what was happening on Earth while the characters of Across the Universe were in space. Author links: Website | Goodreads | Facebook | Twitter    [/dropshadowbox]

You can buy The Body Electric here :
Amazon | B&N

Thanks for stopping by today. Good luck in the giveaway!

Reading this book contributed to these challenges:

• Winter COYER 2014 2015

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