ARC Review: Soulprint - Megan Miranda

Title: Soulprint
Author: Megan Miranda
Pub Date: February 3rd, 2015
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Childrens
Page Count: 368

From the author of FRACTURE, a riveting new thriller which draws on cutting-edge science.

Alina Chase has been contained on an island for the last 17 years—whether that’s for the crimes of her past life, or for her own protection, well, that depends on whom you ask. With soul-fingerprinting a reality, science can now screen for the soul, and everyone knows that Alina’s soul had once belonged to notorious criminal, June Calahan, though that information is supposed to be private. June had accomplished the impossible: hacking into the soul-database, ruining countless lives in the process.

Now, there are whispers that June has left something behind for her next life—something that would allow Alina to access the information in the soul-database again. A way to finish the crimes she started.

Aided by three people with their own secret motivations, Alina escapes, only to discover that she may have just traded one prison for another. And there are clues. Clues only Alina can see and decipher, clues that make it apparent that June is leading her to something. While everyone believes Alina is trying to continue in June’s footsteps, Alina believes June is trying to show her something more. Something bigger. Something that gets at the heart of who they all are—about the past and the present. Something about the nature of their souls.

Alina doesn’t know who to trust, or what June intends for her to know, and the closer she gets to the answers, the more she wonders who June was, who she is, whether she’s destined to repeat the past, whether there are truths best kept hidden—and what one life is really worth.

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Soulprint is kind of like a thriller mixed with a sci-fi. Or at least, I feel, that's what it could've been. This book had a lot of potential and I appreciated the idea. Unfortunately, it dragged on, causing me to lose interest mid way through.

Mainly, the pacing completely killed me. It was so unbearably slow. I felt like this book had so much potential to be exciting and kind of cool but every time a good pace was starting to happen, Miranda brought it back to her 10 mph. The beginning started off with a bang as Alina was busted out of jail. That part, I was eagerly turning the page to see what would happen next. Unfortunately, after that, it was a whole bunch of talking. That leads me into something else.
There was SO MUCH dialogue, it got to the point where I just wanted to tell everyone to "shut up." Dialogue is usually fine, even a lot of it. The problem isn't that there's a lot of dialogue; it's that there's a lot of dialogue in comparison to the actions these characters did. They did nothing until like fifty percent in.

The main character, Alina, was actually alright with me. It's kind of strange; usually, most of my frustration comes from the main character. In a way, I actually admired Alina. She was so ready to be set apart from the criminal everyone had her pegged as. It's a shame that she had such a great mindset, yet [I feel] didn't really do anything. And by the middle of the book, her wants became complaints.

Finally, there is something that was really weird about the writing in the first few chapters. It got to the point where I seriously thought about DNF-ing. Maybe it's because Soulprint is the first book I've read since the summer or because of my two a.m. brain but I had issues. Thankfully, I got used to it by half the book.

But the most disappointing thing about this book was how it left me so frickin' confused. I'm so confused, even now. I read this book without reading the summary first and maybe that's why I have all this confusion but even without the summary, I don't think I should've been this confused. This book starts off with a "bang" and it left me to pick up the pieces. Questions I had were "Who is June Calahan?" "What is soulprinting?" and how does it work. Some were never really answered, making me feel like a complete idiot. In a sense, I felt almost... blind, reading this.

In conclusion, there are things about this book that could've made it enjoyable for me, but it just didn't agree with me. I've heard great things about Miranda's other books so even though this one wasn't for me, I'll probably find myself picking up another of her works.

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Megan Miranda is the author of FRACTURE, HYSTERIA, and VENGEANCE. She spends a great deal of time thinking about the "why" and "how" of things, which leads her to get carried away daydreaming about the "what-ifs." Megan has a degree in Biology from MIT and currently lives near Charlotte, North Carolina with her husband and two children.

Her next book, SOULPRINT, will be published in early 2015 from Bloomsbury.