FRACTURED

Those intrigued by Terry’s first book about Kyla (Slated, 2012) will find themselves swimming in a morass of her memories in this second.

Kyla’s past lives as Lucy and Rain are indistinct and muddled. While Kyla has escaped the worst effects of being Slated (the wiping of her previous life and memories), her personality has definitely been fractured, as the title indicates. Readers are left to puzzle out what actually happened and why. The family she is placed with has direct ties to a martyred prime minister, and her personal doctor is the one who invented the Slating process. Coincidence? Irritatingly vague events and dream sequences abound and seem to have import, but the threads fail to cohere. Readers familiar with the first book will find seeming inconsistencies (Kyla’s visceral reaction to blood late in the book contrasts with a not-so-visceral one in an early scene) confusing, and they will wonder how and why the other characters seem to change personalities as quickly as Kyla does. In this shifting moral environment, there is so little to trust that the authorial manipulation of events becomes all too evident.

Readers who decide to go with the flow will reach a violent and surprising payoff, but it will take dedication to get there.