Book Review: ReGeneration by L.J. Singleton
This book is printed by Thorndike Books, and I picked up for two reasons: It had a cover that didn’t draw me in, but tag lines that did, and it is a large-print that is not a 1950’s mystery for adults…very unusual.
Hav’sing finished it, I can say it has a good idea — Varina, a 15 year old girl, meets a boy, Chase, who proceeds to inform her that she is really a clone, and that they must round up the other clone children. The story starts with an interesting flashback of Chase as a little kid, on a boat with 3 scientists, two of whom treat like a son, and a startling event that occurs.
Did I mention this book has cliffhangers all over? Not that that’s a bad thing, but some of them seem far-fetched. At times I could ignore the writing style, which I found had abrupt spots, with exclamation points here and there, or sentences that just didn’t read right to me. I was hoping for another The House of the Scorpion, which like this book, dealt with power struggles and human cloning, with a child narrator, and even though this is the first book in a series, I have no need to look at the others.
The main character, Varina, may be confused and disoriented with the news that she is a clone and scientists are out to get her, but she swings wildly between trusting whoever she meets completely one moment, and being suspicious of their intentions the next. While this makes sense under the conditions the book sets — for instance, that she’s just met this boy Chase when he starts telling her stories — it ends up tiresome and doesn’t serve any purpose.
I was interested with the initial trouble on the boat in the beginning, and I maintained my interest during Varina’s introduction to her life with her uncle Jim, despite some reading problems I had with the story, but as the story goes on, it lose momentum quickly. Each clone is revealed to have a particular kind of superpower (which, if they actually had them in real life would probably more a lot less controllable — like the kids who can hear people through walls but wear headphones to school).
And as each clone is selected into the group, the story of each character is repeated, so that by you get two or three characters introduced, this one story seems to take up most of the short book. That’s rather annoying.
In the meantime, guardians pop up out of the woodwork with regualarity to take care of Varina and the others — commonly people she has never seen before. Meanwhile, cliffhangers on all sides, Varina’s Uncle Jim lays in the hospital, and while Varina mentions every so often, that she wants to be at his side, that she trusts him absolutely, she goes on shopping trips with an aunt she has never met before, spents one day with the woman and concludes that with all the time spent with her aunt, she’d never learnt of her family.
Well, in a day, that might not always be something mentioned on the first day. Somehow I don’t consider a day much time.
Varina and the others manage to get cars and planes with ease and always escape just ahead of the scientists — which makes sense, as all good serials do. However, even if this is for younger readers, its cliffhangers and wording jarred me out of the story on several occasions.
It’s excellent that I found it in large print…something that should happen more with books. It’s also excellent to see a large family of adopted handicapped children in the story at one point.
It is however hilarious when Varina comments that her mouth dropped open when a child in a wheelchair stood and walked.
I laughed.
This is kind of a joke in the disabled community, you understand.
While it makes perfect sense that Varina would think that, it’s really old. To the author’s credit, the family does explain why the child walks — and it’s a reason I can believe. But here’s the thing, you can be in a wheelchair and still walk, or at least some people can. You may only be in the wheelchair for long distance walking, etc.
The story ends with a cliff hanging that’s been hinted at. But most of the book, unfortunately, instead of minor world building or charactors, is spent collecting children, running from scientists, and repeating, just so the reader doesn’t forget, that they are all clones, most with special powers and tattoos. when they’ve nearly escaped at the end, it makes me wish the characters had been developed, or had done something other than the very beginning of a story. It’s the first of a series, but there’s nothing for me to hang on to in it, nothing I can’t wait to read.
Maybe they have an adventure in the next book. But this one, I’m very sorry to say, can be summed up in a sentence: “There was once a story about clone children and they had to run from evil scientists.”
That’s the start of the story. It’s a great idea. But I needed more story here.