Review: Incarnate

Incarnate by Jodi Meadows
Series: Newsoul #1
Rating: ★★☆☆☆

“You should have left me there. Everyone would have been happier to forget about me.” I collapsed over myself and wept. “I hate you. I hate everyone.”

Good lord, would you like some cheese with your whine?

My quest to read all the popular books in the past few years continues. And I got yet another dud.

To be honest, I didn’t have great expectations for this book. I was prejudiced against it from the beginning, why?

1. The cover is damned pretty. A pretty cover comes with a roughly 77.2% probability of it majorly sucking

2. It’s an YA sci-fi/dystopia thingy. That comes with a 96.4% chance of it sucking

So if my math is right, you multiply the odds, and the chances of this book sucking is huge. HUGE.

And I was correct. This book was pretty awful, but it was not a cesspool of shittiness that I had imagined. Here is why:

1. The main character makes Katniss in Mockingjay (never forget) seem like a pillar of strength. She whines, whines, whines some more. She is useless. Helpless. She can’t get by without Sam leading her and helping her and TEACHING HER HOW TO LUUUURRVE (*turns green and heads for the closest trash can*). She’s a nosoul. Her mom hates her. Everyone hates her. I get it, you poor poor thing, but for fuck’s sakes, have some focus, girl!

Ana is so determined to get to the city of Heart to discover why she’s a nosoul. That’s great, that’s an admirable strategy to figure out the meaning of life – why she exists. The problem is that she doesn’t follow her mission one bit.She spends her time in Heart playing music and mooning over Sam. That’s it!

2. The world building. It is crap. The first few pages of the book was awesome. The premise of reborn souls pulled me in. I love the concept of reincarnation, and the idea presented in this book was so fascinating – at first.

There were a million souls in Range. There’d always been a million souls, and every one of them pulled their weight in order to ensure society continued to improve. Everyone had necessary talents or skills, be it a head for numbers or words, imagination for inventions, the ability to lead, or simply the desire to farm and raise food so no one would starve. For thousands of years, they’d earned the right to have a good life.

Wow!!! Wow!!

Not. That’s where the world building ended. To be frank, there was almost no world building at all. It is a fantastic concept that was never explored. I wanted to know more about the souls. I wanted my questions answered. Questions like…

a) If the souls are reborn every lifetime, are children born all-knowing?
b) Is everyone related to everyone else in some way? Talk about a fucked up family tree…since it has been like a thousand lifetimes in the book, after all.
c) What if you end up marrying your one-time mom like 1000 years down the line?

Etc., etc., so creepy! And furthermore, each soul is agender. You could be male in one life and female in another. Ana, for example, sees a photo of Sam in a previous life as a female (who is hotter than she is). Isn’t that strange? Isn’t that a comcept worth exploring? This fluid concept of sexuality is unusual in an YA book and again, it barely garners mention at all within the book.

Drones! Dragons! Sylphs! Where the fuck do they come from?! More details, please! It feels like the book throws in a mishmash of fantasy stuff without any background.

3. Love. Firstly, there is simultaneously too much romance and no romance in the book. To get back to my previous point, if there has been so many lifetimes, is there really no such thing as a true love, since every lifetime, you love someone else? Wouldn’t love be sort of meaningless then, if you fall in and out of love so easily in every life? I would feel pretty betrayed if my lover loved someone else in another life.

Now, the romance in the book between Ana and Sam exists in a mysterious way because I honestly have no idea why they’re attracted to each other. Some romances sizzle. Sam and Ana just…fizzle. There is no chemistry between them, and half of their romance consist of them making goo-goo eyes and half-missed glances at each other across the room. Give me a break.

In short: wonderful concept, terrible execution.