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The Warm Machine by Aimee Cozza

When a robot built for construction work first sees an angular, sleek prototype military robot slink onto the base he's working outside of, he immediately falls in love. The problem is, only anomalous bots understand the concept of love, and the lowly laborbot has not deviated from his default programming once. So he thinks, anyway. When the laborbot is scheduled for decommission, the military bot cannot possibly live without him, and the two bots set out on a path to find the fabled anomalous robot utopia Root. COVER ARTIST: Aimee Cozza PUBLISHER: 9mm Press YEAR: 2024 LENGTH: 196 pages  AGE: Adult GENRE: Science Fiction RECOMMENDED: Highly Queer Rep Summary: The main characters are robots, likely closest to aro/ace but those terms aren't quite applicable. Gender is also not an important factor. THE WARM MACHINE plays with ideas of friendship, connection, and searching for utopia, all through the lens of a construction robot who falls in love at first sight with a military bot....
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Impostors by Scott Westerfeld (Impostors #1)

Frey and Rafi are inseparable . . . two edges of the same knife. But only one of them is ever seen in public.

Frey is Rafi's twin sister-and her body double. Their powerful father has many enemies, and the world has grown dangerous as the old order falls apart. So while Rafi was raised to be the perfect daughter, Frey has been taught to kill. Her only purpose is to protect her sister, to sacrifice herself for Rafi if she must.

When her father sends Frey in Rafi's place as collateral in a precarious deal, she becomes the perfect impostor. But Col, the son of a rival leader, is getting close enough to spot the killer inside her . . . .

TITLE: Impostors
AUTHOR: Scott Westerfeld
PUBLISHER: Scholastic Audio
YEAR: 2018
LENGTH: 416 pages (8 hours 39 minutes)
AGE: Young Adult
GENRE: Science Fiction
RECOMMENDED: TBD

DNF 1 hour 59 minutes in (23%),

I loved UGLIES, but IMPOSTORS feels too young for the adult I am now. It relies enough on knowledge of the first series, but I think I’d be confusing for someone who tried to start here without reading the original quartet. The new stuff that it adds feels very coincidental. Early on there’s a thing that happens to Rafi where's she's thinking about something that she predicts is totally gonna happen. It ends up forcing the moment instead of building any kind of anticipation, messing with my thoughts and chilling the meta-narrative level in a way that pulled me out of the story. There are also references to technology that were thoroughly explain in the previous books, but doesn’t really show how they work this time around. All of this makes it feel like an awkward middle ground between not wanting to rehash things explained before, but also by referencing most things based on them being different this time. Also I don’t like how the romance plot seems very forced.

I'll keep my fond memories of the first three Uglies books and I don't plan to read this new series.

Moderate CW for blood, violence, gun violence, injury detail, medical content, medical trauma, death.

Minor CW for alcohol.

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A girl with long brown hair is wearing mirrored glasses, in which an identical girl can be seen in one lens, and a city skyline in the other lens


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