Under My Skin by Shawntelle Madison
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Hurrah Missouri author! I’ve missed out on a few of Shawntelle Madison’s books on Netgalley, so I was glad to finally snag one.
This book creeps me out–but in a good way. It makes me squirm to imagine what the protagonist goes through: sharing her brain with a hostile intelligence that wants to basically boot her out and take over her life. The writing is descriptive but not overly so, and I found myself wanting to know if Tate would prevail in her fight against her own mind. Body-snatching…it just makes me shiver. I bet you can guess that I’ve never seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
I’m always a little disinclined to read dystopians, but this world wasn’t filled to the brim with bleakness. Clearly there’s been some sort of apocalyptic event, but it hasn’t created zombies–just some machine that transfers consciousness from freaky rich people to younger hosts so the rich people can go on being rich and essentially immortal. I still sort of found myself resisting liking the book, but that’s just my dislike of dystopia (Hunger Games I’m looking at you).
Even though it’s dystopian, I’m interested in finding out what happens to Tate (and Quinn, he of the romantic subplot) and if she manages to keep control of her own skin, so I’ll be on the lookout for the next book in the series. Hopefully its cover will be as awesome as this one!
Received as a free digital ARC via Netgalley and the publisher. Read from January 12 to 15, 2015.