Category: 2. UnWholly

UnWholly Ch18 Risa

Kiana’s a sixteen-year-old who works the infirmary’s night shift, lives for drama, and always blows everything out of proportion. Having been purged from a family of doctors, she has a chip on her shoulder when it comes to proving what a good junior medic she is, so her exaggerations are usually just to make herself look better when she solves the emergency. The fact that Kiana has come to get Risa and isn’t trying to take all the glory herself means the situation must truly be serious.

“A couple of kids were messing with an engine turbine,” Kiana tells her

Risa actually gets something to do! We’re not just hearing about Connor-sue’s manpain, actual plot is coming!!! (more…)

UnWholly Ch21 Lev Part 1

Time to dive into the fourth part of this, Leviathan. See, leviathan starts with Lev and we have a character named Lev so…uh….well…okay, the shared letters are about it.

SURGEONS HARVEST ORGANS AFTER EUTHANASIA
by Michael Cook, May 14, 2010, BioEdge web journal
How often is this going on in Belgium and the Netherlands? Bioethics blogger Wesley Smith drew our attention to a conference report by Belgian transplant surgeons about organ procurement after euthanasia. As the doctors from Antwerp University Hospital explained in the 2006 World Transplant Congress (in a section called “economics”), they killed a consenting forty-six-year-old woman with a neurological condition and took her liver, two kidneys, and islets.
In a 2008 report, the doctors explained that three patients had been euthanased between 2005 and 2007. . . .
At the time of writing the article, the doctors were enthusiastic about the potential for organ donation in countries where euthanasia is legal. . . .
The curious thing about this is how little publicity this has received, even though the Belgian doctors published their achievement in the world’s leading journal of transplant surgery. ~ Transplantation, July 15, 2006; Transplantation, July 27, 2008.

Possibly because this is only a big deal to people who always freak out at anything like this, and they’re just a boring broken record on the subject so everyone’s sick of hearing about it.

There’s a wonkiness to the whole story and I wonder if it’s a matter of not really understanding why things are good or bad. (more…)

UnWholly Ch23 Lev

Charles Cavenaugh Jr. meets Lev personally at the entrance of the crumbling mansion. He’s dressed like he’s too rich to worry about how he’s dressed. Even with the Cavenaugh family fortune long gone, Lev figures there must be enough residual wealth to keep at least his generation living elite.

Or, he still moves in rich circles to get information or because it’d be suspicious to suddenly act otherwise – the fact his mansion started out as the headquarters of one side of the war should mean he’s under at least moderate scrutiny. And he’s obviously not pouring tons of money into his outfit if he’s going with slobby chic.

But no, it’s adults doing a thing, they must be hypocritical or stupid or greedy or maybe all at once.

Also haha Lev thinking “family fortune” and “industry” have any connection these days.
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UnWholly Ch24 Miracolina

Ah, and now we’re actually on Miracolina! She’s very mad. She also continues to be the source of the only good writing in this book:

Would this please them, she wonders, for her to be captured and forced to live whole? Denied the holy mystery of the divided state?

Doesn’t that sound like something a religion would actually say? And what would have more claim to the phrase than a thing that is like the already mysterious death but even stranger, and done for the most noble of reasons? (more…)

UnWholly Ch25-27 Lev, Miracolina, Lev

He’s going on about how incredibly attractive Miracolina’s disdain for him is.

No, seriously, this is looking endgame ship and it’s squicking me out – like, this can be cute if there’s the sense it’s because the guy recognizes and respects her opinion, but here there isn’t, it’s just the novelty and he’s trying to stamp it out at the same time. Worst of all options, really.
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UnWholly Ch28 Cam

New Procedure Allows Kidney Transplants From Any Donor

Welp, that’s it. It’s the end times. Soon we’ll ban abortion, build massive state warehouses for abandoned infants, and have Christian childmurder cults. Even worse, we’ll have the dumbest anarchist group ever and some asshole sue walking around nice-socksing people.

That’s how bad these books are, they even ruin great scientific progress by association.

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UnWholly Part Five Ch36-37 Connor, Risa

We’re reached the fifth part! Matters of Necessity. There are seven parts total. There’s also eighty-four chapters. Luckily, it looks like the “parts” option is a more accurate measure because we are indeed most of the way done and it’s just there’ll be a lot of micro-chapters to come.

Wait, you say. That can’t be right. If that’s so, the plot should’ve kicked in a while ago.

Yes. It really should’ve.

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43-46 Avalanche, Risa, Cam, Risa

Avalanche is actually Risa’s POV but it’s a brief bit followed by another one that does have her name on it, so I guess that’s why it’s deviating from the POV format.

The form she signs has a line saying she does it of her own free will, but of course she’s coerced into it, and It set into motion a cascading series of events that Risa could not have predicted, and yet was expertly orchestrated by Roberta, her associates, and their money.

I like Risa, so let’s be charitable here and assume she means the exact sequence was way more complex than she expected and not that she was flabbergasted by the idea that forcing her to do something that seemed to have no immediate purpose was just part of a larger plan.

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UnWholly, Ch47-51 Audience, Risa, Cam, Risa, Cam

Yup, another string of these two. The two stories really don’t work well as a whole, even though it seems they should – if Risa was lost early on and Connor had to be dealing with her loss while all the other stuff was going on, we would be able to alternate chapters normally. Instead we get first Connor’s storyline, then Risa’s takes over for a bit.

Well, time for that interview. This time, it’s at a morning talk show whose thing appears to be doing friendly puff pieces. Confirming my theory they killed all the reporters from the first batch, everyone’s amazed by this first look at Cam.

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