Nine // by Rachelle Dekker

//published 2020//

This book was kindly gifted to me by the publisher in exchange for a review.  Unfortunately, I misread the email… I thought this review was due by the end of the month, but apparently it was due by September 25!  So apologies for that.

Nine is a fast-paced book about a girl who has escaped from a secret government facility. Helped along by Zoe, a young woman with secrets of her own, they are doing their best to unravel the mystery of Lucy’s past.

There were a lot of things that I enjoyed about this book.  I really liked Zoe a lot.  I also found myself unwillingly drawn to Tom Seeley, the FBI agent in charge of chasing down Lucy.  He’s a classic anti-hero, full of conflict, determined to do his job, but starting to wonder if the job is the wrong thing to do.  There were a lot of layers to this story, and a lot of philosophical questions, mostly centered around the concept of humanity – what makes us human?

However, I ultimately felt like the philosophical questions sometimes took up more page time than the actual story, and there were a lot of extra complications that seemed to have been added only for the sake of bringing up more thoughtful questions, meaning that things got a bit muddled in the middle.  I was also very confused by a scenario towards the end of the book – there were just moments throughout where something kind of odd would happen that would take me out of the story.

While I did enjoy this book and gave it 4*, there was just something lacking.  I was especially surprised at this book’s take on religion, considering the publisher – it really comes across as almost anti-religion, which definitely isn’t what I would expect from Revell.  There definitely wasn’t any moment in time where the characters considered the concept of God, or thought that maybe what makes us human is the fact that we’ve been created in His image.  Instead, the conclusions to the philosophical questions came through as somewhat clinical.

Despite my reservations, I enjoyed this book while I was reading it, and I would be interested to see what else Dekker has written.

Side note: Since Goodreads makes it so much easier to insert spoilers, my review there does have some more details about the things that bothered me a bit – https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3560913813