Hello everyone! I hope that you are all doing well. This review is long overdue, so I hope that you can all still enjoy it!
Let’s discuss Aaru!
Aaru 
Author: David Meredith
Published: July 9th, 2017
Publisher: Bowker
Book Length: 294 Pages
Genre: Science Fiction
Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥
Buy the book: Amazon
**Disclaimer: I received this novel for free, from the author, in exchange for my honest review.**
-Friedrich NietzscheRose is dying. Her body is wasted and skeletal. She is too sick and weak to move. Every day is an agony and her only hope is that death will find her swiftly before the pain grows too great to bear.She is sixteen years old.
Rose has made peace with her fate, but her younger sister, Koren, certainly has not. Though all hope appears lost Koren convinces Rose to make one final attempt at saving her life after a mysterious man in a white lab coat approaches their family about an unorthodox and experimental procedure. A copy of Rose’s radiant mind is uploaded to a massive super computer called Aaru – a virtual paradise where the great and the righteous might live forever in an arcadian world free from pain, illness, and death. Elysian Industries is set to begin offering the service to those who can afford it and hires Koren to be their spokes-model.
Within a matter of weeks, the sisters’ faces are nationally ubiquitous, but they soon discover that neither celebrity nor immortality is as utopian as they think. Not everyone is pleased with the idea of life everlasting for sale.
What unfolds is a whirlwind of controversy, sabotage, obsession, and danger. Rose and Koren must struggle to find meaning in their chaotic new lives and at the same time hold true to each other as Aaru challenges all they ever knew about life, love, and death and everything they thought they really believed.
The cover gave me horror vibes but I did not know really what to expect. I was offered a copy in exchange for a review so I decided to give it a shot!
Things I didn’t like:
- Sexual assault and stalking
- First of all, this really pushed my rating of the book down. I just felt this book was not for me. The amount of stalking, sexual assault, child pornography, it just didn’t sit well with me. As a mother I just had to skim those pages, it made me sick. That is something I just cannot handle, sexual assault and child abuse.
Things I liked:
- Characters
- I did find some of the characters very enjoyable. I really felt connected to Koren. I wanted to hug her, as if she was my own little sister, protect her from the pain she was feeling.
- Plot and pacing
- I did enjoy the overall plot of the story and its overall premise. The idea of having the technology to live on after you die and maintain contact with those you love…that is wonderful. I lost my father at a young age and would have loved to just talk to him one more time. I think it would have helped with closure. At the same time, I see where it could be harmful…postponing grieving.
- The pace was done well enough, I did not find myself bored during the book other than a small segment in the middle. I always wanted to turn the page and see what happened next.
- Flaws
- I do not mean a flaw in the book itself. Rather, I mean the fact that the author explored flaws in the Aaru system itself. The ability to be infiltrated, that was a nice touch. The fact that he did not keep Aaru as a perfect system made the book enjoyable, it was this that really created the plot.
Final Thoughts
In the end, this was not a book for me. Some might be able to move past the issue I mentioned, but I could not. Overall, the premise of the book is wonderful but it is not for everyone.
Would you read this novel? Buy it or borrow it? If you have read it, what did you think?
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