While flawed in some ways, a good story overall with excellent aspects. I think this is a first-time author and that shows here a little. I like scifi and this has contains great ideas. It's essentially a mystery, and has some well-written characters. The plot is excellent as well. I hope the author continues to write. Recommended for scifi thriller fans.

I really appreciate the ARC for review!!

"The Sentient" is a huge book in scope - near-future sci-fi with mind and dream-reading, cloning, space-elevators, extreme religious cults, and an action-packed plot with more twists than a headphone cable left in a handbag for three months. It's never boring, but struggles to balance all of the elements against each other - it might work better if some of the fascinating ideas were saved for a different novel.

It's the 23rd century. The protagonist, Amira Valdez, is a college student specialising in neuroscience - and specifically holomentic reading, a new technology which allows the user to enter the memories and dreams of others. As part of her course, she's assigned a work placement on the Pandora project - the first human cloning project. Amira is devastated - the Pandora project is full of controversy and seems doomed to failure, and a blot on her CV could scupper her dreams to work in space.

Amira was a strong, fiesty character with an interesting past and a real determination to achieve her goals. I liked her - she was well-developed and had flaws as well as strengths, including a certain naivety which was frustrating but made her seem more real. Her relationship with Rozene was fantastic and I loved seeing how it developed. However, none of the other characters were as developed - the book kept an air of mystery at all times at the expense of fully fleshing out its cast. Valerie Singh was intriguing and had some brilliant feminist moments but felt more like a statement than a character. I also wanted to see more of Amira's relationship with D'Arcy and Julian.

The ideas behind this were brilliant. As someone with a neuroscience background, I was intrigued to see how the subjects of holomency and shared consciousness were tackled. Overall, this was more fantasy than grounded in science, and many of the wider ideas had more of a religious bent than a scientific one, but they were well-conceptualised and sounded plausible enough for a novel. The other advances in technology, like little computerised eyes and space-elevators, were also nice touches to build the near-future setting. (Although in a world of space-elevators, why is everyone still getting around by train?)

The contrast between the religious compounds, with their lack of modern technology and strict enforcement of rules around family life, and the science-world Amina worked in were stark. That being said, I'm not convinced that they weren't too different to be in the same novel. It was difficult to believe that the country functioned as a unit with such polar opposite societies in it. There was no real mention of higher, unifying government, and I found the contrast a little hard to believe.

The plot was the strongest part of this. It was intriguing, unpredictable, and made me root for Amira and Rozene throughout. I wasn't that fond of the ending, but the climax didn't disappoint.

Overall, I enjoyed this but I wonder if it would work better as a film than a book. Particularly in the second half, the structure felt more like scenes in a film than a standard novel, and I'd be fascinated to see the world depicted here on screen.

Three stars, for a gripping plot and imaginatively constructed world. For those who like fast-paced, plot-driven science fiction with a diverse cast.

I requested The Sentient by Nadia Afifi from Netgalley because the description hit several of my sweet spots: “Amira Valdez is a brilliant neuroscientist trying to put her past on a religious compound behind her. But when she’s assigned to a controversial cloning project, her dreams of working in space are placed in jeopardy. Using her talents as a reader of memories…”

It’s always a bit of a risk to request a book you’ve never heard of by an author you’ve never heard of, when there aren’t any other reviews to look at and reading new books stresses you out all too easily – but I’m so glad I took the risk on this occasion! The Sentient was such a fun, pacey, sometimes crunchy, satisfying book to read. I want the sequel now, actually, even though this one isn’t out until September!

I’ll mention the single thing that I didn’t like first: there’s a trans intersex character (yay!) who is a sex worker (bit of a trope, can be dodgy) and who is deadnamed when her history is being related (absolutely not okay).

Aside from that, most of the characters were excellently written, especially Amira, the main character. I thought it was an excellent decision to make her a bit of an outsider – she grew up in a cult and escaped a few years before our story begins, so although she’s mostly integrated (and very successfully), the way she thinks and many of her opinions and assumptions are still heavily influenced by that. It’s a very good way of helping us get used to a world that’s set two hundred years in the future.

In addition, Amira’s just a really interesting character. I liked how confident in her own skills she is, and how that’s one trait of hers that is constant throughout the book. No matter what happens, when she’s looking into someone’s mind she has this quiet but absolute confidence which was delightful. But a lot of her other assumptions and beliefs get challenged: the fact that she, as an escapee from the fundamentalist compounds, has integrated well and been successful, has made her think of her new life as a kind of utopia where everything’s wonderful, and she soon starts learning that that’s not the case. I was fascinated and compelled by her whole journey.

There are some great supporting characters too. Hadrian, of course, is an interesting one whom I definitely want to learn more about. Valerie Singh, too, was fascinating and I just wish we got more of her throughout the story – of course, as an author you can’t put in every single thing about a person, but I just ate her up! Even Alistair Parrish, who seemed pretty straightforward and perhaps a tad bland at first, became more complex as the story developed.

My absolute favourite was Rozene, who starts out appearing to be a meek little victim but very quickly shows herself to be a lot more than that. I loved her and I hope there will be lots more of her in the sequel. I also loved her relationship with Amira, the way they challenged and helped one another and became confidantes in a way that most of the other characters in the story couldn’t understand.

The plot was exciting and fast-moving. I confess that by the end of the book I wasn’t entirely sure what the villains’ endgame actually was, which was a bit frustrating. I’m assuming that all will be revealed in the sequel, but I think I’d rather have ended by knowing exactly what Amira was up against – or perhaps even with Amira thinking that she knew (and therefore the readers thinking that we knew!) what was going on, even if further information is to be revealed later. Having said that, I have every intention of reading the sequel, so clearly Nadia Afifi’s doing something right!

All in all, I really enjoyed The Sentient. It had some good characters and was a lot of fun to read. Thank you to Netgalley for the advance reading copy – The Sentient is published on the 8th of September 2020.

Near future sci-fi is often difficult to get right, often because the moment you extrapolate from is moving by the time the book comes out. There is a central political idea in The Sentient, the development of tolerated massive orthodox religious compounds in the US which seemed plausibly inevitable in the mid noughties that now seems off the table (not because this level of fundamentalism has gone away, but rather its been superseded by more scary stuff). The Sentient is a story about human cloning, and how religion might take that. Its also a story of survivors of those camps and how the rest of the world (or USA here) might belittle someone who has escaped.

The name of the book is a bit of a misnomer however, and I was thoroughly expecting some AI style novel. Instead its a psychological mystery about what is killing experimental clone mothers, which develops into a somewhat breathless (perhaps too breathless) chase an rescue in the last half. The adventure tropes somewhat overwhelm the science ideas being played with and it only really drops its big ideas in the last couple of chapters, which is a pity because the epistemological consequences of these ideas don't just explain a bit more why the religious were so interested, but are genuinely intriguing ideas in themselves.

The Sentient is most successful when it engages with the trauma of survival, and how assimilation into a different society is not as easy as you might hope, and discusses this from a number of angles. SO while it goes through a number of well worn YA tropes (there is a "sorting hat", a mysterious man, our heroine is special), it does manage to root it in an experiential truth. I just wish it had broken some of its big ideas earlier instead of a race in space.

Review as a Netgalley ARC

I actually wasn’t exactly in the mood for science fiction when I started the book, but it drew me in. Strong female character, a compelling plot, very credible world building…sure, I’m in. Sometimes in the 2220s the future has made plenty of advances, but cloning is still not a thing. It’s about to become a thing, two trial subjects have died but the third one is striving in her pregnancy, albeit under a severe mental duress. Amira, our main character, arrives to mitigate this duress and promptly becomes involved with a conspiracy to prevent the clone’s birth at all costs. Amira and the pregnant girl are both from the Compounds, a backward misogynistic cults with warped agendas…or, in other words, cults. They share a certain affinity, but it’s basically on Amira to solve the mystery, uncover the plot and save the day/the clone. It all sounds pretty good, but after a while the execution faulters. Not sure if it’s debut jitters or the author just got overexcited and decided to cram too many things in one book, but essentially she managed to overwhelm her own plot with too much action, too many characters and just too much going on. Somewhere midway through the coherency of the plot gets overpowered by all the players and all their games. It’s a shame really, because the novel gets so much right otherwise and is actually quite impressive for a science fiction debut until it gets in its own way. With some narrative streamlining, this would have been really good and as it it’s more along the lines of pretty good at times. After a while, for me it just dragged and actually read surprisingly slowly for the page count. Just kind of got tired of it after a while. Obviously I finished it, since I did want to know the outcome and also I do finish all books like a proper completist, but the end result was fairly underwhelming. Very promising potential, though, to finish this on a positive note. So there’s that. Thanks Netgalley.