Reviews with content warning for Death - Sáu đợt thức tỉnh

This was a fun little sci-fi novel about a group of clones on a space mission who awaken to discover that their previous selves have been murdered, their ship’s been sabotaged, they're outside of communication range with Earth, and they don't remember the past twenty-five years. The best parts of this book were the characters trying to piece together their relationships to one another (they've basically just met but the murder victim versions of themselves had known each other for decades), and the world-building around clones and clone related laws.

I docked a star because there are some things surrounding one of the characters’ motivations that could have been explained better and I thought the way the author handled religion was kind of weird. Overall though I would recommend if you want a fun sci-fi adventure and don't mind some gory descriptions.

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smithy361's review against another edition

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dark tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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katrinarose's review against another edition

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adventurous dark mysterious reflective tense fast-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

A fun engaging mystery with some twists I didn’t see coming! The thing keeping it from being 4-5 stars for me is I felt the characters felt a little stiff at times, partly because of the dialogue partly because their backstories were told pretty matter-of-factly. I would still recommend it so someone looking for a good, pretty original sci fi mystery!

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caryndi's review against another edition

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dark fast-paced

Strong character development? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.5

I've wanted to read this for awhile—I first saw it in a bookstore (back in the before times when we could still go to those) and thought the concept sounded interesting, plus the cover art was great. The book as a whole, though, was underwhelming. I found it clumsily written and felt it used gimmicks to increase the tension rather than letting the story do its work. It almost became a DNF for me (which is rare).

For a book that relies so heavily on dialogue, none of the characters had a distinct voice. Some of the dialogue felt like it was written because the author thought it was the way the scene "should" end in a movie or something rather than actually being a good fit for the situation and character.

And—this could just be the part of me that's been trained in screenwriting—but holy cow, there was SO much unnecessary material. The advice to enter a scene as late as possible and leave as quickly as possible is not universal, but it could have improved this book. We would have character A realize something to themself, character B walk in and ask character A about it, and character A go through describing what they had realized, thus repeating something that had happened a few sentences before. This happened multiple times regarding info of varying lengths and was so repetitive.

The characters themselves weren't very strong. As I noted before, the dialogue didn't differentiate them at all. Though they all had unique pasts, I never got a sense of how that had shaped them as individuals. None of them had any strong character traits; though the author would show other people's opinions (i.e., I think Joanna's narration referred to "hurricane Maria" at one point), we never saw actual evidence of this in anyone's behavior. Perhaps because of this, the relationships fell flat; Hiro and Maria's "friendship" was pretty hot-and-cold and felt like its general status was "whatever worked best for the narrative."

The way information was presented in this narrative overall felt cheap, like the author was trying to trick us. Character backstories, etc. weren't revealed in a way that was organic to the narrative and, worse, the rollout was inconsistent. I don't remember any specific examples, but I do think there were situations when a character would have known something because of their backstory, but because the reader didn't yet know it, the information wasn't included. There was also the bit where we learned some of Maria's backstory that

no one, not even she, knew.

That choice wasn't justified narratively except for "the audience needed this information" and felt weird given the way the other memories were presented.

And don't even get me started on the "I did/didn't tell you x because I wanted to see what would happen," which occurred more than once, and from different characters?! I understand some secrets would be kept when everyone wants to move suspicion away from themselves, but that wasn't the case for some things. It really felt like someone had said "hey, why does this happen?" and the author just wrote an excuse into the book and then continued on. It was weird and didn't do anything for the characters—just helped the narrative stay in the shape they wanted it to.

As a reader, I was obviously putting together the information as I got it and trying to figure out the answer; though it was obvious

Sallie Mignon had played a major part, I wasn't able to guess her motivations.

When they did come out, it honestly felt like a bit of a letdown. Then there was some more violence and the book was over! I will say, I was super unimpressed with

the idea to just enslave Paul as an AI-type thing

after people spent so long talking about how horrible it was. Bad things are only bad in certain circumstances, I guess?

Finally, I could not get over their solution to the cloning problem being

the food printer. What?! I'm supposed to believe that this piece of technology made for putting molecules together into food shapes is capable of extracting a mindmap...from DNA in saliva? Like, come TF on, that's not even a reasonable suspension of disbelief to ask for. Your experiences are not stored in your DNA, I can't believe I even have to point this out. Or if that's not what the author was going for, apparently the machine just took full brain scans of anyone who walked by, and privacy be damned.

Honestly, it didn't feel like the characters really "solved" anything, they just had a series of lucky accidents that ended with everyone being okay.

In some ways, the concepts in this book reminded me of Altered Carbon minus the ~edgy shock value~ but also not nearly as well written. The pieces were there, but the way they were put together was very frustrating to me as a reader and the ultimate payoff didn't feel worth it.

Recommend? You have to know this is going to be a no.

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