This was another one of those books I found in the Kindle Daily Deals a while back. It had been sitting in my reading queue for a while, but for some reason today I just felt compelled to pick it up. I know I've been "currently reading" Love in the Time of Cholera for ages now, but it's hard to keep plowing through when you're not particularly invested in any of the characters.
I confess that I spoiled the ending of this book for myself before I even read it. I read through a lot of reviews of this book, trying to decide if I wanted to buy it. I knew how the story would end and I was apprehensive about the fact that several reviewers had called the heroine "unlikeable." But in the end, the premise of a futuristic robot love story outweighed the possibility of paying a few dollars for a book I didn't like.
The narration follows the limited third-person perspective of Cat, the titular daughter. The story takes place in the future, after a natural disaster wiped out most of the human population. Robots were then created to help rebuild civilization, at least until the human population was able to bounce back. The book begins when Cat is a little girl and her father brings home a mysterious robot named Finn that is startlingly human-like and one-of-a-kind in the world. Over the course of the novel, Cat grows up into a woman and we see her struggle at different points in her life as she becomes more and more aware of the feelings she has developed for Finn--who, though almost eerily human, is only a robot.
Though this book is categorized as Science Fiction, it's not quite the standard type you see in the genre. I can already think of certain friends of mine who are big SFF buffs, and I know this book won't be for them. In contrast, I don't read much SFF but this book is right up my alley. Yes, it's a love story--but it's also a bildungsroman and a character study of a heroine going through very complicated emotions.
I'll grant what the reviewers were saying about Cat being an unlikeable heroine. She has quite a number of faults. She hurts several people over the course of the story out of selfish reasons. But although there were times when I was dying to jump into the story and shake her shoulders, I liked Cat as a heroine because thanks to how flawed she was, I feel that her character grew and matured noticeably by the end of the book. I cared about her enough that I became very emotionally invested in her story.
Other complaints I heard were that reviewers wished Cassandra Rose Clarke had gone into more depth with the world-building. A part of me does wish there was a more detailed picture of how civilization has changed since the Disasters. I thought it was very interesting that society seemed to have reverted to old-fashioned norms, such as housewives going back into fashion. This actually set up a really interesting dynamic between Cat, who is inclined towards art and other "housewife" pastimes, and her mother who is a scientist in her own right. I felt like Cat's relationship with her mother never had any real chance to grow and be explored, which was a pity.
Now that the minor criticisms are out of the way, here's what I have to say: this book completely drained me. Quite literally, I felt an aching while reading this book. The plot wasn't the most clever thing I've ever read, but Cassandra Rose Clarke's prose was so lush and melancholy. I've never used the highlight function on my Kindle app before today, but while I was reading this book I couldn't stop marking different lines that caught my eye.
Also, Cat and Finn.... sigh. I spoiled the ending for myself, but the very reason I kept reading was because I was rooting for them so bad, I wanted to know how they were going to overcome such a huge obstacle. Y'all have probably figured out that as cynical as I may be, there's a romantic hiding deep inside. But my favorite love stories are the ones where you have no idea how they'll be able to overcome all the barriers in their path. There's a yearning that spans distance and time, kind of like the one that made me love Daughter of Smoke and Bone so much. Again, this book isn't for everyone. But for me, it left a lingering weight in my chest the way one might feel after a long cry.
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ETA: I just went and looked around Cassandra Rose Clarke's website, and she listed Francesca Lia Block as one of her favorites writers that had a heavy influence on her own writing. Boom. No wonder I liked the prose so much.
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