Exhausting politics

While there is a tiny bit of action, this story is 99% a political drama that explores consequences of human cloning and experimentation.

I enjoyed it but, whew!, it was long. The characters are very complex, have character arcs and are very well performed by the excellent narrator. Although the narrator is excellent, I question the choice of accents used to distinguish the minor, almost 2D bad guy. Based on my experience of many,many friends who are 1st and 2nd gen immigrants, I reject the performance of characters' voices with strong accents drawn from the characters' ethnic origins (identified by the ethnic origins of their names). That misguided choice was really distracting and I hated the stupidly simplistic and xenophobic stereotyping that underlies that accent choice. I initially knocked one star off the narration for that, but later reset to 5 stars because 99% of the story didn't involve that character and, really, the narration performance was fantastic.

It felt like the story starts slowly because I didn't, at first, realise that this book was going to be a character based, political story. So at first it felt like a massive info dump to set the context (and in a way, I guess it WAS)....but later I realised it was just the first part of the story that was almost entirely like that. The story became gripping once I realised that it was being told through politics. I wish there was a gratuitous epilogue; after 36 hours with these well-wrought characters (decades of their lives), I really care about them. i feel particularly the lack of information about Justin's father(s?) (Jordan and Paul) and what their hopes, thoughts and future plans are.

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