Review: Swans & Klons, Nora Olsen

Swans and Klons by Nora Olsen
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I received a copy from Netgalley.

The premise of this book sounded really good. And at first it was, I quite liked the idea of an all female futuristic society, and there was some logical explanation as to how the female society is divided and where they came from. The basic purpose of the humans seems to be live a rich and full live, and all the manual works and dull jobs are done by what appear to be genetically engineered slaves called Klons,

Females grow up at an academy and when they are sixteen they are paired with a mentor from the city. The story starts off promising, we meet the main character Ruberic, she's creative and artsy and dying to get a well known artist as her mentor. We also meet her love interest, Salmon Jo (that name drove me nuts) who was more sciency and quite bold and smart.

They uncover a secret about the Klons that shatters Ruberic's world and the rest of the novel is about them trying to deal with it. It...wasn't as good as it could have been. Ruberic got to be a very annoying character, she seemed quite shallow...and got annoyed when people didn't seem to like her way of thinking. And while she and the girlfriend complimented each other well, I didn't get the feeling of closeness between them other than a very close best friends with some major kissing. Ruberic talks about how much she loves SJ, and several occasions does stupid things to choose her over all others...but, meh. I didn't feel it.

Whole I liked that both girls wanted to do something about the secret they discovered, and Ruberic's idealism in dealing with the problem...they seemed to dive into their mission without much thought other than feeling it along as they went. It worked for a while but got quite irritating that a lot of it seemed to be luck.

By the end I wanted to slap Ruberic several times. She wound up grating on my nerves with her decisions.

The writing itself was flawless, and the story was nicely fast paced, I read it in a few days and would very much like to read something from this author again. Unfortunately, with this one, the characters just didn't do it for me.