Book Review: Replica

Replica by Lauren Oliver

Released: October 4, 2016

Read: September 2016

Publisher: HarperCollins

Format: ARC, 544 pages

Series: Replica #1

Description on Goodreads:
    Gemma has been in and out of hospitals since she was born. 'A sickly child', her lonely life to date has revolved around her home, school and one best friend, Alice. But when she discovers her father's connection to the top secret Haven research facility, currently hitting the headlines and under siege by religious fanatics, Gemma decides to leave the sanctuary she's always known to find the institute and determine what is going on there and why her father's name seems inextricably linked to it.
    Amidst the frenzy outside the institute's walls, Lyra - or number 24 as she is known as at Haven - and a fellow experimental subject known only as 72, manage to escape. Encountering a world they never knew existed outside the walls of their secluded upbringing , they meet Gemma and, as they try to understand Haven's purpose together, they uncover some earth-shattering secrets that will change the lives of both girls forever... 

Review: 

    When I started this book, I had two main theories:

1. Lyra was a clone version of Gemma. So when Gemma was born, her parents allowed Haven to extract part of her DNA and implant it into a willing mother to create Model 24.

2. Gemma herself was also a clone, and that's why she has heart problems (because the clones are still not perfected). She's called Frankenstein not for the reasons Gemma believes, but because she's unnatural and was created instead of born, just like Frankenstein. 

    Obviously I'm not going to say what happened with my theories, if one of them was true or if they were both failures. But I like the way it turned out. 

    Replica  by Lauren Oliver is not like other books. For one, the main plot is told through two different perspectives, each a separate story, that ends the same way. But the POV switch isn't every chapter or every three chapters. When holding a physical copy of the novel, let's say with Lyra's side on top, you could read until about halfway through the novel, and then the printing is upside down. If you reverse the book (as in physically flip it over), you could read Gemma's side of the story until halfway through the book where you yet again hit where the printing is upside down. It's literally two stories in one. 

    Now because of the two stories in one, you can read it many different ways:

1. All of one story and then all of the other.

2. One chapter of one story then one chapter of the other.

3. Like #2, but instead of only chapter by chapter, you could read multiple chapters of each at a time before switching. 

    As it turns out, I read three chapters of each before flipping, with the exception of reading a few extra chapters of one of them when I got distracted. It's really interesting that Lauren Oliver wrote Replica this way. I mean, it's never been done before and it can change the way you view the book by reading it a different way.
    The content itself I have a back and forth opinion on. I like the idea of the novel, the whole description, but the way it was written was kind of bland to me. I was left anticipating a huge revelation throughout the entire novel, but that feeling was never satisfied. I mean, come on, shouldn't all books end with a bang? Overall, it was worth reading, but I hope the sequel can grab (and hold on to) my attention. 

Favourite Quotes:

• "On very still nights sometimes we can hear them chanting, calling for us to die." -Lyra
• "Monsters, they call us. Demons. Sometimes, on sleepless nights, we wonder if they're right."   -Lyra
• "All the words she could ever want: words to stuff herself on until she was full, until her eyes burst." -Lyra
• "She wanted to say: We don't exist. She wanted to say: We have no choice. But even as she reached for the words, the cord tethering her thoughts snapped, and she was bobbing, wordless, mindless, into the dark." -Lyra
• "She didn't know what she was waiting for or looking for anymore. Only that out there, in the real world, there were no answers- nothing but vastness and things she'd never seen in real life and experiences she couldn't understand and strangers who didn't know what she was and would hate her if they did." -Lyra
• "Something leapt to life in her chest, a force beyond the guilt and the fear. It was like she'd been living in a cartoon, in two dimensions, her whole life, and had just fought free of the page." -Gemma
• "And in that second she knew, she truly understood, what Pete had said to her outside. Monsters weren't made, at least not by birth or fate or circumstance. Monsters chose to be monsters. That was the only terrible birth, the kind that happened again and again, every day."      -Gemma
• "All these people on their way to something, on their way from something. All these stories and lives, all of them orbiting temporarily around the same parking lot before spinning away from one another again." -Gemma

Rating: 6/10

Recommended if you like: fantasy, fiction, Lauren Oliver's Delirium trilogy, mystery 

Keep flipping pages,

Lauren