Review: The Originals by Cat Patrick

The Originals
Author: Cat Patrick
Genre: YA Science Fiction / Romance
Released: May 2013 by Egmont
Source: Purchased
Rating: ★★★

Goodreads | Purchase Online

I glance at the three baby portraits in thick wooden frames. I feel a familiar prickling on the back of my neck. Because I know there's another picture somewhere - and the baby in that photo looks identical to the babies on the wall. Somewhere, there's a photo of the Original.

Ella, Betsey, and I look like sisters: triplets, you might think.
But that's not what we are at all.
We are clones in hiding. We split our lives and exist as one person in the outside world. And we've always been happy.
But now I've fallen head-over-heels in love... and that changes everything.
Because, to let love in, I need to be allowed to me Me.

I've been a fan of Cat Patrick since I read her first novel, Forgotten a couple of years ago. Because she had yet to disappoint me, I was really looking forward to reading The Originals, due to a mixture of my bias towards her and also the fact that I thought the premise of human clones in the regular world sounded pretty interested. Unfortunately, this fell kind of flat for me with a few things just not doing it for me.

The Originals tells of Lizzie, Ella, and Betsey, who are human clones living as a single person. While the idea of this did interest me at first, that kind of fizzled out at the story progressed. It took a while for the story to get going, and even longer for the shit to hit the fan, but I didn't want to DNF this. I wanted to keep going because there were so many unexplained things tat, unfortunately, remained unexplained. I realise that sometimes asking questions at the end of a book is a good thing, but when you're kind of left with too many simple questions that could be explained, it's sort of a problem. On top of that, a lot of the book was forgettable and for a story that has romance as a major plot point, there was very little but I'll get on to that in a bit. The way that the story flowed felt quite strange. It flowed quite slowly for most of the book, and then suddenly sped up before slowing down again, so it felt as if very little had happened at all and became pretty underwhelming.

My main issue with The Originals came with the characters. Despite having different personalities, the girls felt very similar to each other quite a lot, which kind of defeated the purpose of them wanting to lead their own lives. Lizzie didn't really keep me engaged with her point of view and I honestly didn't feel like she had any chemistry with Sean at all. Even once they'd made their feelings for each other known, it still felt like they were just pals. There was no spark between them to the point that I would have rather they just stayed best buds.

The other characters weren't too interesting either and I wished that I had got to see them a lot more, Ella and Betsey in particular. Because the story centres around Lizzie, Ella and Betsey are sometimes rarely even seen and although they didn't really engage my interest too much, I did like them more than Lizzie. And also, I didn't think much of Sean, who'd I'd almost completely forgotten about by the end of the book because he seemed to get shoved out of the way to make way for Lizzie's sisters.

I had a bit of trouble writing this review due to the lack of feelings that I had in general. The Originals wasn't great, and it wasn't awful. And the fact that I just finished the book without many thoughts actually makes me kind of sad because I really like Cat Patrick's work. Hopefully her next book will impress me more. Or at least make me feel something.