TW: implied domestic violence
This is a sci-fi domestic thriller that follows 2 women - Evelyn and Martine - as they navigate a truly unprecedented relationship. Evelyn Caldwell is an award winning research scientist who focuses on cloning - human cloning. Evelyn's lab grows human clones and programs their personalities in order to fit the job - body double for potential assassination attempt, for example. She's dedicated, focused, no-nonsense, and she's recently found out her husband is having an affair with Martine. Martine is a clone made from Evelyn's research and she is the opposite to Evelyn in many ways and a seemingly perfect match for Evelyn's husband. Except now the husband is dead and the two women team up in order to protect themselves and their future.
There are a lot of things I liked about this book, but my favorite was the concept and execution of the overall plot arc. I was telling my mom about the plot and the first thing she said was that it sounds like a movie. And I completely agree. I found this to be a very commercial, fun to read, intriguing story that I would 100% would not be surprised if it got a movie adaptation. This is not a super heavy sci-fi read and there more thriller aspects really do a good job of balancing out the science-y stuff. Gailey's writing was incredibly easy to fall into and I found myself getting lost in the pages for longer than I intended a few times (but who needs to go to bed on time anyway?). One of my main worries going into this book would be that it would have a lot of either sci-fi or thriller elements and not much of the other. However, all the aspects of what I look for in a sci-fi and a thriller were there but neither overpowered the other so my reading experience ended up being really satisfying from both sides.
I didn't love the place in the plot where the book started. We start with Evelyn as she's accepting an award and see her having to dodge questions about her soon to be ex-husband, Nathan. I was expecting to start before she found out about the affair so it felt like I missed out on a pretty central emotional moment to the plot. We do get bits in flashback form where she found out about Martine and confronted Nathan but I still found myself wishing we would have started earlier and found out with her. I also wish we didn't know Martine was a clone going into the book. That reveal was built up so well and it really felt like it would have been a mic-drop moment in the book except that I already knew she was a clone going into the story. I think if the clone reveal and the affair reveal were done together like a one-two punch it would have been really great. But we miss out on the affair reveal happening before the book started and I knew about the clone ahead of time so both were less emotionally hard hitting than I wanted them to be.
I thought the science elements were handled really well. I don't read a ton of sci-fi but the number one aspect that will make or break a sci-fi for me is how naturally integrated the science is in the book. Some books really take me out of the story when they suddenly start feeling like a textbook when the science stuff is introduced. The cloning technology wasn't too far out of reality (they grow humans in tanks filled with artificial amniotic fluid) and there were a lot of words that I recognized from all my soapy TV medical dramas so it felt grounded. The technology felt like it could be only a few years away from current day, not hundreds of years in the future, so I think even non-sci-fi readers could have a good handle on that side of the story. There were some parts that got a bit hand-wavy and skimmed over with general language and I'm glad we didn't get bogged down in every single step of the process being explained to the reader. (but maybe fans of more in depth sci-fi would find those omissions bothersome).
On the thriller side of the story, this was a pretty typical domestic thriller with secrets being revealed throughout the story. There weren't any super high action or high tension scenes (no high speed car chase running away from the killer, for example). However, there were a ton of reveals and twists in the story that I didn't see coming - the one at 80% really threw me for a loop - so they were satisfying. I do wish there was a bit more tension on Evelyn and Martine when they were trying to figure out what to do after Nathan's death and I think that would have helped with the overall stakes in the story. Despite Evelyn stating that her career would be over if any of the events in the book got out, I never felt like she was ever really in danger of being found out. I would have liked maybe a surprise lab inspection or something.
Finally, I found this to be an overall character driven story, which is my preference. The larger discussion in the book centers around what makes a person a person which was really interesting to watch Evelyn and Martine work through their feelings on. There's also a bit of question of what is genetically ingrained in someone vs what can be artificially programmed into them. Evelyn and Martine were the main two characters we followed, but we do get their interactions with Evelyn's lab assistant as well as scenes from Evelyn's childhood which helped show their different relationships. Gailey did a fantastic job at really ingraining in the writing the different ways the characters act with one another. Evelyn would be more curt and straightforward with her lab assistant than with other people and we can see that not only in her outward interactions and dialogue with him, but also her internal monologue would change. I think Gailey did a fantastic job setting up the character relations for the reader to immediately know the status quo only for those relationships to be changed as the story progressed. I wouldn't consider Evelyn an entirely likeable person - she's very cold, a bit rude at times, and does come across as a bit full of herself - but I found her to still be very human and easy to root for as the book's events unfolded which is really the best thing I could hope for.
Overall, this is a very well balanced sci-fi domestic thriller that would appeal to a broad range of readers. I found the characters to be intriguing, the plot well paced with good reveals, and I was satisfied with the ending. I do think we missed out on some emotional connection since the book started after a big plot point that I think would have been better suited to be explored on the page.
256 pages.
Publication date is February 16, 2021.
Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor/Forge for the ARC in exchange for review.
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