Very Good! Colony of earth clones left on frozen planet trying to survive and eventually terraform the planet encounter a native life form just as the almost entirely virtual "creche-born" parents in the spaceship return to try to kill the life form and

Middle of the pack SF adventure with OK world-building, but few surprises or characters straight out of high school. An Earth colony barely survives on an icy moon of a Jupiter-like planet. They're clones, created in gendered pairs, that been left to fend for themselves by the creche-born. The creche-born spend their lives in virtual reality, while their bodies lie hidden in the star ship that founded the colony. The creche-born supposedly set off for another star system, but in fact they are at the edge of the system, planning to return and take back the planet. They view physical creatures as disposable. Most of this long novel follows, Manda, whose birth pair was killed at birth. As the only single in the colony, she's a bitter loner, keeping everyone at a distance. She is an annoying first-person narrator for the first several chapters. Mixon says the book was inspired in part by Leguin's Nine Lives, but by using Manda as the only POV character, all you learn about being a clone are linguistic quirks like "I-we think you .." and pairs completing each other's sentences.

I have no idea what the title is referring to. ( )

Annoyingly whiny and bad-tempered protagonist; the initial premise was too implausible; deus-ex-machina interventions. There were some interesting ideas but the drawbacks were too much. ( )