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rhysand-vs-fenrys · 5 years

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TPIJ Book Recommendation: “Hullmetal Girls” by Emily Skrutskie

Representation: Aromantic Asexual

Aisha Un-Haad would do anything for her family. When her brother contracts a plague, she knows her janitor's salary isn't enough to fund his treatment. So she volunteers to become a Scela, a mechanically enhanced soldier sworn to protect and serve the governing body of the Fleet, the collective of starships they call home. If Aisha can survive the harrowing modifications and earn an elite place in the Scela ranks, she may be able to save her brother. Key Tanaka awakens in a Scela body with only hazy memories of her life before. She knows she's from the privileged end of the Fleet, but she has no recollection of why she chose to give up a life of luxury to become a hulking cyborg soldier. If she can make it through the training, she might have a shot at recovering her missing past. In a unit of new recruits vying for top placement, Aisha's and Key's paths collide, and the two must learn to work together--a tall order for girls from opposite ends of the Fleet. But a rebellion is stirring, pitting those who yearn for independence from the Fleet against a government struggling to maintain unity. With violence brewing and dark secrets surfacing, Aisha and Key find themselves questioning their loyalties. They will have to put aside their differences, though, if they want to keep humanity from tearing itself apart.

Click here for ‘50 Must-Read LGBT Fantasy Books’ by Casey Stepaniuk

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mobilepubliclibraryteens · 6 years

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#hullmetal girls #emily skrutskie #ya book #new release

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booksofteacups · 6 years

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Waiting on Wednesday: Hullmetal Girls by Emily Skrutskie

Waiting on Wednesday: Hullmetal Girls by @skrutskie

Release Date: July 17, 2018 Publisher: Delacorte Synopsis: Aisha Un-Haad would do anything for her family. When her brother contracts a plague, she knows her janitor’s salary isn’t enough to fund his treatment. So she volunteers to become a Scela, a mechanically enhanced soldier sworn to protect and serve the governing body of the Fleet, the collective of starships they call home. If Aisha can…

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#Blogging #books #Emily Skrutskie #Hullmetal Girls #Waiting on Wednesday

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thespoonieandherbooks · 5 years

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Title: Hullmetal Girls Author: Emily Skrutskie Publisher: Random House Children Publish Day: July 17, 2018 Rating:🥄🥄🥄 Description: Aisha Un-Haad would do anything for her family. When her brother contracts a plague, she knows her janitor's salary isn't enough to fund his treatment. So she volunteers to become a Scela, a mechanically enhanced soldier sworn to protect and serve the governing body of the Fleet, the collective of starships they call home. If Aisha can survive the harrowing modifications and earn an elite place in the Scela ranks, she may be able to save her brother. Key Tanaka awakens in a Scela body with only hazy memories of her life before. She knows she's from the privileged end of the Fleet, but she has no recollection of why she chose to give up a life of luxury to become a hulking cyborg soldier. If she can make it through the training, she might have a shot at recovering her missing past. In a unit of new recruits vying for top placement, Aisha's and Key's paths collide, and the two must learn to work together--a tall order for girls from opposite ends of the Fleet. But a rebellion is stirring, pitting those who yearn for independence from the Fleet against a government struggling to maintian unity. With violence brewing and dark secrets surfacing, Aisha and Key find themselves questioning their loyalties. They will have to put aside their differences, though, if they want to keep humanity from tearing itself apart. My review: Compared to The Abyss Surrounds Us -- this wasn't a go-to read like the first one of her books that I read. I try not to compare books but sometimes it's really hard not to do since I was hyped up about her previous work. I was hoping for the same feeling as I read this but it wasn't there. It's still an interesting read to go into but not something I had imagined it should/would be. Downloaded from Netgalley for free in exchange for an honest review.

http://www.spoonsnbooks.com/2019/02/hullmetalgirls-netgalley.html

#Book Reviews #Spoonie #Spoonies #Spoonie blogger #Spoonie Reviewer #Chronic Illness blogger #Books &

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aion-rsa · 6 years

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Hullmetal Girls by Emily Skrutskie Review

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Gristly, female-lead science fiction YA paints a vivid picture but borrows too much from genre predecessors.

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Megan Crouse

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Jul 15, 2018

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Hullmetal Girls by Emily Skrutskie has everything I might want in a book: friendships between angry female cyborgs, super soldiers with a persistent and creative body horror element, and a confined, high-stakes setting on a human fleet wandering between stars. Unfortunately, while these elements are emphasized and mixed in excellent and new ways, many other elements of the story are tired and left me struggling to get through the first half of the book.

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Latchkey by Nicole Kornher-Stace Review

Best New Science Fiction Books in July 2018

There’s a quilt of homage or repetition here: the armor suits and augmentations from Old Man’s War, the spacefaring class system of An Unkindness of Ghosts, the military mind-meld of Ninefox Gambit, even a few phrases lifted directly and jarringly from Star Wars. Too full of horror to be a comfort read and not detailed enough to be transporting horror, Hullmetal Girls is stuck in a strange in-between place — while still being exactly the kind of book I’m glad to see enter the science fiction YA canon.

The main push of the story starts with Aisha Un-Haad, the anxious and devout daughter of a low-District (read: lower class) starship in a fleet organized in social tiers. In order to earn enough money to treat her younger brother’s disease, she joins the Scela, super-soldiers augmented with hullmetal and artificial intelligence. She’s joined by Key Tanaka, a judgmental upper-tier girl who can’t remember why she decided to undergo the painful and dangerous modifications required to join the corps.

From the beginning, the pacing is a bit odd; the reader is thrown into the (fascinating and gruesome) augmentation process with hardly enough time to get to know Aisha or her family. The first half of the book is primarily concerned with Scela training, which I found to be surprisingly slow for how excellent the actual science fiction was. The augmentation is horrific and vividly described, but the recovery feels rushed.

Skrutskie’s super soldiers are impossible to mistake for human; I love the descriptions of metal skeletons so bulky the characters can’t turn their heads. Ports along their jaws and the scar-tissue-bounded ridge of the AI connection make the Scela look alien, a fact that the main characters never fail to remember even if the cover illustration seems to have forgotten. The persistent discomfort and joy the characters get from their modifications was one of my favorite aspects of the book, explored on both an emotional and physical level in a way that felt like a cool and careful response to the super soldier genre.

The corps camaraderie comes across too, and I loved seeing characters enjoying their newfound strength. The AI called exos are almost characters in their own right in an interesting way, their alien impulses and toothy self-preservation providing some of the novels’ most interesting texture. I love the idea that young women reading science fiction will know it’s a place where angry, scarred girls can get super powers and navigate tough moral choices.

However, those characters are exactly why reading this book was slow for me. Chapters switched back and forth between the two voices. Compounding the feeling that I didn’t have enough information about either of them, the two voices sound very similar despite their different reactions to things. Even with their names signposted at the beginning of the chapters, I found myself losing track of whose perspective I was reading. Their history lacks warmth and detail, and the resolution of Key’s memory loss looks extraordinarily similar to a different blockbuster YA protagonist. The worldbuiding in the starships is far less interesting than the exosystem between the characters’ ears. Instead of gradually showing the world-building, information is doled out in a way that feels a bit too polished, a bit artificial.

Sometimes, the exosystem functions conveniently, with characters sometimes struggling to hide their thoughts and other times switching in and out of the mind-meld comfortably. More explanation of this might have been distracting, but combined with the prose — unexciting if technically varied — and the strangely muted pacing in the beginning, it took me out of the story even more without an explanation. A major plot point that I thought would connect to the rest of the narrative fizzled out, even though it was a key part of Aisha’s motivation in the first place. Even by the end there wasn’t enough detail about the world for Aisha’s family to feel real, and we never really meet Key’s.

The writing style is clean and punchy, but the use of first person dilutes rather than enhances it, smoothing out strong verbs and emotional insights into a lulling train of thought. The voices drag instead of kicking the momentum into gear, even when the scenes themselves are dramatically satisfying. About halfway through, the stakes and drama rise and the story becomes more compelling. Action scenes are breathless, and both characters are allowed to fully feel and act on their justified anger. The lack of underlying detail means that Aisha and Key’s emotional resolution feels thin, even as it sits neatly within an action scene I’d love to see on screen.

This novel is so very close to what I wanted it to be that to say otherwise is uncomfortable. I loved the characters as ideas rather than people and, to a degree, that’s fine — especially for someone unfamiliar with the super soldier subgenre, Hullmetal Girls could be an exciting and empowering story. But "empowering" does not make up for world-building that seems partially lifted from The Hunger Games. I respect it and hope it’s exactly the story someone else needs, but I’m not entirely sure I enjoyed it.

Read Hull Metal Girls. For more science fiction books out in July 2018, check out our full list.

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