I feel like I should put this disclaimer here: I am Team Samm for Kira (i.e. I ship Kira x Samm) but I love Marcus too. Which is why I’m featuring him today.
Also, no spoilers! :)
The human race is all but extinct after a war with Partials—engineered organic beings identical to humans—has decimated the population. Reduced to only tens of thousands by RM, a weaponized virus to which only a fraction of humanity is immune, the survivors in North America have huddled together on Long Island while the Partials have mysteriously retreated. The threat of the Partials is still imminent, but, worse, no baby has been born immune to RM in more than a decade. Our time is running out.
Kira, a sixteen-year-old medic-in-training, is on the front lines of this battle, seeing RM ravage the community while mandatory pregnancy laws have pushed what's left of humanity to the brink of civil war, and she's not content to stand by and watch. But as she makes a desperate decision to save the last of her race, she will find that the survival of humans and Partials alike rests in her attempts to uncover the connections between them—connections that humanity has forgotten, or perhaps never even knew were there.
Dan Wells, acclaimed author of I Am Not a Serial Killer, takes readers on a pulsepounding journey into a world where the very concept of what it means to be human is in question—one where our humanity is both our greatest liability and our only hope for survival.
Seriously, people.
Marcus. MARCUS. He freaking makes this series. He is fabulous. And hilarious. Look:
“If you insist on going through me to get him, it’s your call. But I warn you, I will probably cry when you hurt me, and you’ll feel bad about it later.”I feel like Marcus provides the much needed comic relief in the Partials Sequence, which is a pretty grim series on the whole- all children dying in their first few days of life, genetically manipulated human-like life forms threatening to defeat and enslave all humans, civil wars breaking out all over the place...in this sort of setting, it's always great to have a character that just breaks up the tension.
“Well-” Marcus stopped, trying to find the right words. “I was- that was kind of going to be the part of the scheme I didn’t tell him out loud. Like, he would come over to free us because he was swayed by my brilliant and well-considered plan, and then when he got close you could jump up and…knock him out or something.”
Woolf groaned.
“You’re a Partial,” said Marcus. “You could beat up a guy while still in handcuffs, right?”
“That was a terrible plan,” said Vinci. “I can say without exaggeration that that’s actually the worst plan I’ve ever heard.”
“People aren’t mugs, we’re clay. Living, breathing, thinking, feeling clay, and we can shape ourselves into anything we want, and we keep shaping ourselves all our lives, getting better and better at whatever we want to be, and when we want to be something else we just smooth out the clay and start over. Your lack of ‘purpose’ is the single best thing about you, because it means you can be whatever you want.”
In his more serious moments, Marcus actually contributes some really encouraging words, and I think the sort of advice he gives is the kind that our main character Kira takes to heart.
There was this awesome dialogue between him and this certain other character at the end of the third book, but I can't include it here because it's a spoiler. BUT MY GOD, YOU SHOULD READ THIS SERIES JUST FOR THAT CONVERSATION. It's the best!
There was this awesome dialogue between him and this certain other character at the end of the third book, but I can't include it here because it's a spoiler. BUT MY GOD, YOU SHOULD READ THIS SERIES JUST FOR THAT CONVERSATION. It's the best!
Have you read The Partials Sequence?
If so, how do you feel about Marcus?
If not, do you want to read the series? (The answer should be yes.)
