Once again, another book I’ve left for ages, but wish I had picked up sooner.

I loved the apocalyptic setting, which is just realistic enough to appeal to me, and the idea of the technology that allows all sorts of cosmetic changes, healing and a whole host of things was really interesting - the possibilities of something like that are endless!

The characters were really well described and fleshed out and I’m looking forward to picking up the second and third books. There is also a prequel novella, so plenty to be getting on with.

This Mortal Coil was a fun, action-packed YA story about a virus that makes people literally explode. It's all a bit grim, and I don't think the story would be for everyone following the Covid pandemic, but I had a lot of fun reading it.

I really liked the main character, Catarina. She was science-y and nerdy, but in a cool, sophisticated, l-know-what-I'm-doing kind of way. Not that nerds aren't cool, but she was one of the coolest ones.

I found the concept to be very interesting, especially all the stuff about the virus. I get that it's not for everyone right now, but I still really enjoy reading about viral outbreaks and how people could possibly deal with them. This virus was a little different as it was a bit of zombie, a bit exploding organs. Fun!

I think this is such a solid YA book, and while I'm personally not going to continue on with the trilogy - I didn't quite care enough - I think younger readers would love it and get a lot out of it. There's even a not-so-terrible love triangle too!

I thoroughly enjoyed this. It's a really well written, with realistic, well rounded characters. They pace is fairly fast and keeps your attention focused on the book. Yes, some of the twists are predictable, but that doesn't detract from the novel at all.

It is am interesting read with some nice twists in it and enjoyable.

If you are into genetics then this book may be for you

I like dystopian fiction but sadly this book was not for me and so could not finish it. A slow beginning, complex and confusing plot.

unfortunately this one wasn’t for me, i couldn’t connect to the story for some reason so i had to DNF. But i’m intrigued to pick and and try more from this author in the future.

An incredibly fast-paced YA thriller that managed to surprise me at every turn. Unbelievably well plotted - seriously, it's astounding - the action never stops, the reveals never end and the characters are unbeatably well crafted and I seriously hope our little broken murder babies get revenge and manage to find their place in the world.

When a lone soldier, Cole, arrives with news of Lachlan Agatta's death, all hope seems lost for Catarina.

Her father was the world's leading geneticist, and humanity's best hope of beating a devastating virus. Then, hidden beneath Cole's genehacked enhancements she finds a message of hope: Lachlan created a vaccine. Only she can find and decrypt it, if she can unravel the clues he left for her. The closer she gets, the more she finds herself at risk from Cartaxus, a shadowy organization with a stranglehold on the world's genetic tech. But it's too late to turn back. As the pieces fit together it's clear there is one final secret that Cat must unlock. A secret that will change everything.

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

There is some really good YA fiction out there. For me, this is not one of them. I found it too predictable. It started off quite well but I found myself getting bored as the story continued. I won't bother with the sequel.

I believe this is Emily Suvada’s first book and what a great start it is. She plunges us into a world some 100 years into the future where bio technology has moved on in an almost unbelievable way but in a way the author manages to explain clearly without resorting to gobbledegook. Although in this future world humans can be implanted with technology that allows them to alter their own DNA in a way that makes them immune to most illnesses and able to repair even major tissue damage, they are still unable to deal with an advanced virus originating from South America and which is now devastating the world, resulting in affected people exploding into a cloud of deadly wind-borne dust. The main character Catarina Agatta, aged 17, is the daughter of an eminent scientist Dr Lachlan Agatta, who had been working on an antidote but has since been forced to work for the Cartaxus organisation which means to keep any antidote for its own use. Aligned against Cartaxus is the Skies resistance movement which Cat, with her highly developed hacking skills, joins in an effort to get hold of the antidote. When Cole, a former Cartaxus soldier, arrives to inform Cat that her father has died but that the antidote had been completed and has been imbedded in his own DNA, the Skies group, and Cat, now have to work to decrypt the DNA coding and access the antidote and save what is left of the human race. This is a very well written and enjoyable book and I look forward to reading further work from this author.

I keep finding it so hard to get through ebooks lately. I'm so glad I have a physical copy of This Cruel Design because I know I'll be faster at reading it. That said, I really enjoyed this book.

It's so full of twists, like wtf twists and it's crazy. I'm loving Catarina's character, she's full of strength but still so vulnerable and what she has to go through and what she's been through is horrible. And I adore Cole, he's so protective and loving. I want one. Please.

Received via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review

When I started this, I struggled to understand what was happening, what things meant but then I got a couple of chapters in and it all clicked. We’re promised action, fast paced moments, and potentially a whole lot of blood.

This book has massive amount of potential. It’s definitely got a sci-fi feel to it which I normally don’t go for, but I found myself enjoying it immensely. I was a victim of the One More Chapter problem, and I also found myself avoiding housework so I could read.

The idea of the Hydra virus, and how people on the surface keep immune is unique. It is also equally disgusting. Exploding people? Yeah, that’s all featured here. The idea of people having tech and apps inside of them is also different for me, and I could see the appeal of reading more books like this.

I liked Catarina. She was this strong, independent girl. She was bad ass and knew what she wanted. Unfortunately, she also became a bit stereotypical of having to rely on a man to keep her functioning in a sense. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Cole. But Cat leant on him a bit too much towards the end of the book. She should have carried on being the independent bad ass woman. When Cole was first introduced, I thought we were going to have very dominant romantic feel to the rest of the story, but thankfully it feel to back of the storyline until about 80% through. And that, for me, was when Catarina become less independent.

This book is very descriptive, and well thought out. The little details about the coding, the pigeons at the beginning of the book, and even the bunkers were all described perfectly. I was gripped within a couple of chapters and I was on tenterhooks for the majority of the book. There were a few twists and turns throughout, and I will be honest when I say I didn’t see them coming.

I did enjoy this book, it was completely different for me and it made a good change. I liked the characters, I liked the storyline, and e whole general idea of the story. I’ve given it 4 stars though, if Catarina had been as strong at the end of the book as she was the beginning then it could have been different.

A Zombie Apocalypse full of twists and turns and plot twists but also touching on some serious issues: Genetic Coding, advanced Tech, the evolution of super-viruses and what a person will do to stay alive.

It starts off slow and it’s quite hard to read as it explains this post apocalyptic world and the modern science of it but then it begins to pick up its pace. Welcome to a world that has been crippled by a deadly virus outbreak that has forced most of the population underground into hiding, and the rest struggling to survive on the surface where they’re forced to do horrible things to survive.

It is a dark and brutal dystopia packed with the most fascinating sci-fi science, but in a way that’s still easy to understand and the whole idea behind genetic coding and having apps and tech that run within your body was utterly brilliant, mixed with some twists I did not see coming and even managed surprised me!

I cant wait to read more especially after that cliffhanger ending!

Straight away I was surrounded by a sense of urgency, I had no idea what was going on but I could tell Catarina was in danger and needed to move fast. The world was strange and alien to me but this is what made it so fascinating, I wanted to know more about how and why the world had changed.

The more I learned, the more I wanted to know and I found myself flying through the pages - the characters were strong and the setting was dark and edgy. I wasn’t expecting the touch of romance that filtered through the storyline like a ray of sunshine on a dull day but I loved it!

There was quite a bit of technical jargon involving computer codes and genetics that I’m not even going to pretend I understood but honestly it didn’t matter because I was enjoying it so much. I loved how tense the atmosphere was and how each new discovery completed another piece of the puzzle.

I can’t write this review without mentioning all the twists and turns, one in particular was seriously gasp-inducing and something I absolutely hadn’t seen coming.

This was an addictive read that played on my mind even when I wasn’t reading, I can’t wait for the next instalment!

This book was freaking awesome. I could not put it down. Utterly original, characters I really cared about, a fascinating plot. I cannot wait for the sequel!

This Mortal Coil had a great premise but there were a few things throughout that stopped this from being more than a three-star book for me.

While I found the story really interesting and engaging (and unpredictable on top of that!), I was confused a lot of the time. That could have just been me reading too fast to really grasp what was going on, as is often the case, but even parts which I went back to reread were a bit unclear, and there was a lot that I felt was never explained.

I also wasn’t a huge fan of Cole and as I’m all about character-driven plots, it made it difficult for me to really care what was happening where he was involved.

I did really like Cat – it couldn’t have been easy for her to realise she’d been lied to over and over again. I was also really concerned this book was going to be standalone (so many things unresolved!) but thankfully, it’s going to be a trilogy, and I will be continuing on with it. Though hopefully in the next book, the phrase “my darling girl” won’t be dropped about a hundred times…

Overall, I did enjoy this book and would pick up the sequel.

I have very mixed feelings on the book. I found that the first 3/4 of the book was very confusing and boring. There's so much information given and most of it just went over my head, it was all dumped at the same time so i felt as if i was reading a non-fiction book. I also did not like the fact that the characters all had very conflicting feelings and actions towards each other which changed constantly so there was this sort of love triangle/square but not really. There was insta-love and a lot of jealously. 

I did like the ending part of the book, a certain thing is revealed about the main character and from that you can guess the twist which i really liked. Even though i did find the world building too wordy i did enjoy reading it. 

However this book does drag a lot and there is so much going on and everything is too crammed in especially at the end. I liked the main twist but there is another reveal near the end which i did not like because it was really 'extra' to me. The main character just felt 'too special' like we already know she the 'chosen one' character type, now she's that to the extreme. 

Even though i did not love this book i still really want to read the next book. The plot is interesting and i want to know what happens next. 

3/5

I really enjoyed this novel and absolutely powered through it. I loved the post-apocalyptic world that Suvada imagined, as well as the detail she put into the genetic technology and enhancements. It did mean that there was a lot more 'tell me' than 'show me' but I found it really interesting.

I've seen a lot of criticisms of the 'love triangle' but it didn't bother me. I've chosen to mark it down for the ending - after everything was resolved, it felt as though the publisher has suddenly said 'wait, we can do more!' and everything else was slotted on, even though it did fit with what we already knew, just so we could get another book.

This book is exactly the type of book I love (which probably explains why I bought the paperback without realising I had the exact same book already on my kindle...). I am currently writing a YA book, and if it ends up as even half as good as this one, I'll be happy! I loved the writing style (to the point narrative with no extraneous waffle) and the concept of the world. I sometimes find with YA dystopian / sci-fi books, that they start off strong (interesting premise and intriguing world-building) but soon start meandering and losing their way a bit. I'm happy to report, this book was amazing throughout, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest in the series. I hope the next 2 (?) books are as good as this one.

I tried a number of times to get into this book but it really wasn't for me. I found it rather gruesome and the characters could not win me over. I am sure some will really like it and I understand that, but it was not for me.

This book has been on my TBR for a while and I finally got around to picking it up. It was so fast-paced and exciting that I absolutely whizzed through it and I’m so glad I chose this one because I now cannot wait for book two.

The world building in this book is so superb. There’s so much technology and science woven into the story and it’s well thought out and explained. Although there’s plenty of tech and science speak it’s well explained to the reader and doesn’t take over the story. This was probably my favourite aspect of the book, learning more about the virus and the genetic enhancements people have made.

The book is a fair size – nearly five hundred pages – but it is so action packed that it feels like quite a quick read. The chapters are also quite short a lot of the time and that definitely made me say ‘oh just one more’ on more than a few occasions. There’s plenty of surprise twists that I absolutely did not see coming and definitely made my brain explode. I also really liked the characters in This Mortal Coil. Cat is an excellent protagonist, she’s incredibly smart, stubborn and brave.

A slight word of warning though that romance does feature quite heavily within the plot. I’m not a particularly big fan of romance books so this was the one aspect of the story I didn’t really enjoy, I wanted to skip the romance and head straight for the action and the saving the world-y situation. Despite that I really enjoyed this story, it was original exciting and I definitely need to know what happens next.