{Review} Expiration Day - William Campbell Powell

Expiration Day by William Campbell Powell
Genre: YA Science-Fiction / Dystopian
Release Date: Apr 22 / 2014
Publisher: Tor Teen

What happens when you turn eighteen and there are no more tomorrows?

It is the year 2049, and humanity is on the brink of extinction...

Tania Deeley has always been told that she’s a rarity: a human child in a world where most children are sophisticated androids manufactured by Oxted Corporation. When a decline in global fertility ensued, it was the creation of these near-perfect human copies called teknoids that helped to prevent the utter collapse of society.

Though she has always been aware of the existence of teknoids, it is not until her first day at The Lady Maud High School for Girls that Tania realizes that her best friend, Siân, may be one. Returning home from the summer holiday, she is shocked by how much Siân has changed. Is it possible that these changes were engineered by Oxted? And if Siân could be a teknoid, how many others in Tania’s life are not real?

Driven by the need to understand what sets teknoids apart from their human counterparts, Tania begins to seek answers. But time is running out. For everyone knows that on their eighteenth “birthdays,” teknoids must be returned to Oxted—never to be heard from again.

-A copy was provided by Raincoast Books for review-

Expiration Day was a bit of a disappointment for me. The premise sounded so good but it wasn't written all that well. 

Right from the start, I knew I hated the diary format the author uses. It felt forced and with Tania's voice, you can tell it's a middle-aged man that wrote this book. Teenage girls don't really talk or think like that and I think in some cases it was taken to the extreme. For example, there was a scene where Tania got jealous because his crush was staring at her best friend's boobs. And then she went onto thinking, why wouldn't he look at my boobs? That whole thing was ridiculous and petty. Girls don't think like that ('cause, y'know, I'm a girl, I would know). That was just one example though; there are tons more scenes like that throughout Tania's more early years. 

I wished the whole Oxted and declining population thing was explained more thoroughly. We didn't get any history or interesting information to go off of other than the small bits Tania found on the TeraNet. Speaking of the technology, this is supposed to be 2049. The technology they use seems less advanced with the stuff we use now. AllInFone sounds like iPhone when it just started and TeraNet is just the internet. We also didn't get much investigating that the synopsis promised. I thought it'd be more digging out government hidden files but it's mostly Tania going through her daily lives along with conflicted stupid boy drama. 

The only redeeming quality was the ending. Near the end, the book finally got to the point and talked about the bots being recycled at 18 and whatnot. They went through the court case and we finally find out what happens to the robots when they go back to Oxted.

Honestly, I wouldn't really recommend this book. Even though the ending was good, the whole ride leading up to that point was really boring. Tania wasn't much of an interesting character though her occasional intelligent trains of thoughts were better than thinking about boys and other petty stuff. I would tell people to give this one a pass if they plan on picking it up.

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