brokenbiscuits

I really enjoyed Artificial Gods. It's about a college girl who comes home for the summer and sees a UFO in the sky. Although she's not the kind of person who believes in alien life, the next day she's visited by some men who behave very strangely. . . and it just gets weirder from there. Her sister Chrys and a boy that Chrys either is or is not dating get involved in the otherworldly hijinks as well. Are there really aliens? Or are there even darker forces at work that are disguising themeselves as alien life? The story gets a little bit grisly at times, but always stays interesting and unpredictable. I really liked the main character Jasmine, especially her musings about the underpinnings of her relationship with her sister and with boys. Also, the novel has a consistent light humorous touch. The story is set in the Hudson Valley where I live (to get specific, it's set in Pine Bush), and it's always fun to read a story set somewhere you know.

I previously read We Shadows, the first book in the series, which is about all different characters (although Shane and her friends make a cameo towards the end of Artificial Gods.) I don't think having read that or not having read the second in the series made a big difference to my reading enjoyment. To me these books seem more like companion novels than a series, strictly speaking, and I'm guessing you could probably read them in any order. I suppose I don't really know until I read them all, but that has been my experience so far. I like it when a series is written out of order, a la Lois McMaster Bujold.

What didn't I like about this novel? The formatting! This is one of the first ebooks I ever read so I don't know if this is common or if it's something I could have fixed somehow, but the line breaks were all screwed up so that they ended in the middle of

the line and had weird spaces (like this.)
It drove me bananas! But eventually I got used to it.