The Fiction Conniption

There wasn't the best world-building happening here. The premise of two souls inhabiting one body from birth is super original, and I was very excited to read how that would play out. The biggest problem I had was that it was never really explained why hybrids were such a threat to the government. It is mentioned many times throughout the book that the rest of the world is still hybrid, and only Addie and Eva's small portion of the "Americas" has been slowly bred to weed out those hybrids.

The government now hunts, imprisons, and experiments on these hybrids that have fallen through the cracks, attempting to 'fix' them. But they don't appear to pose any real threat to anyone. Hybrids don't have any sort of special powers, or super strength - I didn't see one good reason at all for the government to make such a big deal out of them. And the book itself doesn't offer much more explanation than "I'm a hybrid, and that's bad." Beyond that - it's never really explained how coupling in general would work in the outside world.

How do people get married? Do you just hope that both of your twin souls happen to fall in love with both of the twin souls of your spouse? Or what? That part sort of skeeved me out.

I didn't necessarily buy that the whole concept itself would ever work anyway. I did love the relationship between Addie and Eva, the twin souls. They truly were inseparable, and I loved the way that neither would want to exist without the other. Their interactions and the angst between them was so relate-able.
Addie, the dominant soul, deals with the guilt of having control over their body, and also struggles with the fact that she can never be truly alone in her own body. The fact that she would want to be alone, just for a moment, makes her feel terrible, because it is essentially saying that she wishes that Eva didn't exist anymore - and that's not what she wants either.

And Eva must deal with the fact that she is the dormant soul - she has no control of her own body or voice. She must sit back and watch, trapped, as Addie lives their life. I really identified with both of the girls. Neither is in a situation I would ever want to find myself in. The inner conflicts they dealt with were heart wrenching. There's a "major" revelation that happens about halfway through that I wasn't impressed with. I put "major" in quotes, because once again - it just sort of fizzled for me.

Given that the rest of the entire planet is still hybrid, more than anything I found myself wondering why Addie and Eva hadn't thought that there was something more going on in their little part of the world. What did they think made them so different? Did she think that they all just happened to be a part of the world whose souls were settling? It took a while for this book to really speed up.

The start was decent, and things did happen in a believable timeline, but it did end up ultimately getting very good. It wasn't until I was about 3/4 of the way through the book that things really started to unfold. But by then, I was convinced that this one had some pretty great potential, and I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for the next book.