Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Girl Parts - a review by George Morejon




Girl Parts
by John M Cusick

*** stars

Girl Parts starts off with a girl killing herself on the internet. She broadcasts it on webcam with an audience of her schoolmates watching. After this happens, a new psychiatric comes in to help with the disassociation problem (being disconnected from the real world) the students are facing. The solution he recomends is to assign "companions" to these kids, including popular rich kid David Sun. David is a stuck-up brat who just wants to fool around with girls, but still a person chosen for the programme. When he gets his companion, whose name is Rose, he finds out he cares for her and wants to be with her more than any other girl he's been with before. David thinks he's found his dream girl, but things change at a party when he finds out that Rose isn't "fully functional", if you know what I mean.

When David finds this out, he abandons her at the party, and Rose wanders out into the forest lost and confused. She finds her way to an ocean ridge and is about to jump, which would destroy her link to the Sakora satellites helping her understand things and also probably deactivate her, but a kid named Charlie (who she'd only met one time before when David hit him with a car) tries to save her, dragging them both into the ocean. Charlie's kind of disconnected from society, so after Rose gets desynced from the satellite, they form a sort of bond. This bond strengthens as he hides her from the Sakora agents who are looking for her so they can deactivate her and helps her get over David basically throwing her away.

This book took about 4 hours to read and was way different than anything else I have read, so I wasn't that sure what to think of it. I hadn't seen the idea of robot companions like this in any novel, although I wasn't unfamiliar with the idea. I liked David up until he dumped Rose, which I thought was a jerk move to do. Rose was interesting and I liked being able to read how she was programmed to think, before and after her big change. Her want to be accepted by people and be real reminded me a lot of Pinocchio. Overall, I'd give this book a 3 out of 5.

6 comments:

Halea Coulter said...

It sounds like an interesting enough book with a good plot, I'll read it.

Aspen Gates said...

I have been deciding wether or not to read this book, but now I think I will.

TheBookNurse said...

This sounds rather interesting and must admit, it's a bit different than what other YA I've been reading!
Reminds me of a Twilight Zone episode where this guy working on the moon has a robot wife.

Hope Austin said...

Well, it doesn't sound like what I thought it was going to be, so that's good. Maybe I'll pick this one up, too.

Ian Zig. said...

This book actually does sound really good... But why exactly did you give it 3 stars? I might read it

Amy Lyon said...

Interesting... I might check this out, but 3 stars