This book is full of interesting ideas and interesting characters. A runaway plot powers everything along with reckless abandon. Underneath it all are the big questions of what it means to be human and what happens to a society definitively split between haves and have-nots. The writing is good enough that I went along for the ride. But the whole is less satisfying than all the parts led me to expect.

The biggest problem is that the main character spends most of his time reacting and recovering, rather than acting. We don't know what drives him, other than he has a chip in his brain and this puts him in peril from those who deem such 'amps' as a danger. He's too much of a blank slate for someone in their twenties that's made it through school and is a teacher.

For their part, the antagonists were not much better. For most of the book it appears that they are opposed to amps and want to round them up because they don't like them. That seems overly simple and so they all come across as dastardly villains, rather than real threats. Even the most developed antagonist is complex mostly because he is inconsistent, other than his consistent efforts to work against his own interests.

Bottom line is this is another fantastic concept of a book from Daniel Wilson, but once more he disappoints in the execution. Even so, I look forward to his next effort. ( )

So Humans create tech to fix problems like epilepsy and ADD and insert them into kids and other people who need it. The technology evolves and people get them inserted to be smarter, faster and the military gets involved...
Then everyone freaks out and get legislation to pass making discrimination against people with this technology legal. A war is planned. Everything goes crazy.
I liked this book. ( )

It's such a violent book, and graphic at points, but it has a happy ending. ( )

I found this book very disappointing. Great premise, but it just didn't deliver. ( )

This is another story from Daniel H Wilson about how humanity is defined, and what defines it.
This is a difficult question to answer in normal times, but when prosthetics become so entwined with the human body that to remove them would be partial, if not toal, death, does humanity define itself by the absence of tech? ( )