Replica

I am a sucker for “trying to solve their own murder” tropes so when I saw this book for free on Kobo I knew I had to give it a try. 

Because there's so much going on, the book doesn't delve too far into the issues of identity that arise from the premise (is your clone also you? Is your clone a human? If you get murdered but your clone is activated right away, are you dead?) but it does bring them up and I was impressed with the way they were addressed. The twist of who actually committed the murder and why actually managed to surprise me.

I also enjoyed the two main characters, Nate and Nadia. They start out very stereotypical YA leads but grow in interesting ways over the course of the story. There's another character I found really intriguing but she's not introduced until quite late in the book so I wish we had seen a bit more of her. 

The other characters are pretty thin and stereotypical: there's a hot bad boy named Dante, a few “mean girls”, an obsequious British butler, and a moustache-twirlingly evil nemesis. There's also only one Black character and her entire role is to experience racism.

I also found the worldbuilding to be a bit shaky. It's a sort of cyberpunk-lite dystopia built on top of the old United States where the executive class act like characters in a Regency romance for some reason (inherited titles, arranged marriages, strict rules of propriety and gender roles, attending balls all the time) and homophobic conversion therapy still exists but religion is never brought up at all, which felt weird. The writing style was a bit awkward as well, switching around official names and slang names for seemingly no reason and often reusing words or phrases in the same paragraph.

While I enjoyed parts of this book, other parts were weak for me. I'm not sure if I'll read the other books in this series or not.