Name: Expiration Day
ISBN: 9780765338280

William Campbell Powell

Born a rare human child into a world of sophisticated child androids that were created to counter a decline in global fertility, Tania records in her diary her efforts to learn about teknoid technologies when her best friend begins exhibiting bizarre behavior.

Expiration Day

Cindy Lee

Read more of my reviews at Secrets of Lost Words.

-A copy was provided by Raincoast Books for review-

Expiration Day was a bit of a disappointment for me. The premise sounded so good but it wasn't written all that well. 

Right from the start, I knew I hated the diary format the author uses. It felt forced and with Tania's voice, you can tell it's a middle-aged man that wrote this book. Teenage girls don't really talk or think like that and I think in some cases it was taken to the extreme. For example, there was a scene where Tania got jealous because his crush was staring at her best friend's boobs. And then she went onto thinking, why wouldn't he look at my boobs? That whole thing was ridiculous and petty. Girls don't think like that ('cause, y'know, I'm a girl, I would know). That was just one example though; there are tons more scenes like that throughout Tania's more early years. 

I wished the whole Oxted and declining population thing was explained more thoroughly. We didn't get any history or interesting information to go off of other than the small bits Tania found on the TeraNet. Speaking of the technology, this is supposed to be 2049. The technology they use seems less advanced with the stuff we use now. AllInFone sounds like iPhone when it just started and TeraNet is just the internet. We also didn't get much investigating that the synopsis promised. I thought it'd be more digging out government hidden files but it's mostly Tania going through her daily lives along with conflicted stupid boy drama. 

The only redeeming quality was the ending. Near the end, the book finally got to the point and talked about the bots being recycled at 18 and whatnot. They went through the court case and we finally find out what happens to the robots when they go back to Oxted.

Honestly, I wouldn't really recommend this book. Even though the ending was good, the whole ride leading up to that point was really boring. Tania wasn't much of an interesting character though her occasional intelligent trains of thoughts were better than thinking about boys and other petty stuff. I would tell people to give this one a pass if they plan on picking it up.

Rating: F

Expiration Day

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