Not just for YA.

I listened to this on Audible and found it to be a really good story. To start with we had the back story of a young man struggling to make his way in world set against his kind. He wants to be a legacy human, the way to ascending for a better life. I can's say more about the plot without ruining the story.
I thoroughly enjoyed listening to this book. It's been quite a few months since I listened to it and just forgot to review at the time for some reason I thought I'd already written a review. However, this was one of those books that even though I listened to it a while ago and have listened to (and read) a lot of other books since, I can still remember the story and the feelings I had whilst listening to this book. I loved it. I think it's aimed as a YA book , but as someone that isn't YA, I still enjoyed it. I would actually like to see a sequel to this book.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

Totally surprised !!!

Some times you just know that you won’t like a book and I was sure that this is one of them.
To my surprise I was so wrong The Legacy Human was hard to put down, I actually liked it so much that I can’t wait for the next one to come out.
Truly amazing and written so well !
Narrated perfectly.
This book is joy if I had to describe it with one word.

I fully recommend this one to all.


For an honest review I accepted this audiobook for free.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful

Much more rewarding than I thought

I'll review the first 3 books because that's what matters. Book 1 is almost a red herring.

TL;DR: Each book gets progressively better. They get progressively more epic in their scope and emotional presence, Eli becomes (a little) more mature, and the characters coalesce into something you will probably care about and feel for.

The worldbuilding in book 1 is rough around the edges. Not because it wasn't well thought out, but because the first-person perspective starts off very limited; warped by Eli's background. It gets better.

I'm an agnostic-atheist, so when I realised that spirituality and religion was also thrown into the mix of rebellion and post-singularity AI mind enhancements, I felt a bit queasy. Why does God have to be inserted into the story at all? Won't that ruin the experience? Well, I changed my mind on that. It was well handled, delicately, impartially, and in a way that makes the characters' actions far more meaningful within a science-fantasy setting. It adds to the story rather than using religion to take ethical shortcuts. The books explore life with more depth than I expected for books this short.

This is not science fiction. It is a sort of urban fantasy.

The protagonist starts off as a buffoon who will do whatever it takes to get a cure for his dying mom. He knows little and lands face first into danger and layers upon layers of conspiracies and scheming. There are occasional major deaths, but each death propels the plot to greater heights.

The narration is top notch. You can recognise the different characters from their accents and their voices before they're revealed.

Thankfully, there isn't almost any interpersonal drama.

The Ascended are supposed to be super-intelligent, but I wasn't convinced. They seemed to be too easy to trick at times. Ah well. Can't have everything.

It's definitely worth listening to. It's not even long, sadly. 10+10+10 hours and if you finish book 1, you barely got a taste of what it's about. The tomfoolery in the first book was still fun to listen to. It's almost its own story with Eli's world staining to expand.

I was skeptical of this story at first. It looked like something superficial, but it's not. I'm so glad I took the chance. Now I have to wait for book 4... I might listen to it again.

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

The grass isn't always greener

In some ways this is your typical book one of a series, you have a chosen one starting to realise their significance and the troubles this causes, but the world the author builds is an interesting one that helps this novel move beyond this standard starting point.

In this world you have legacy humans who are the have-nots of this future world along with the ascenders who are a post-singularity machine/human hybrid that are almost considered god-like by some humans and hated by others. Elijah (or Eli) is one such legacy human and a talented artist, albeit one who is unable to consciously control his talents with his best work only being produced when he enters a fugue state.

The ascenders seem to value the creativity of legacy humans very highly with the only way for a human to win the right to ascend is to win one of the events in the creative Olympics and this is something that would be very important for Eli since it would also mean that his sick mother could also ascend and in the process would have her cancer cured too. Eli gets his chance to enter the games when Marcus, a friend of his ascender patron Lenora, offers to sponsor him despite Lenora's objections, but what are his motives for doing this for Eli.

From the point in the book where Eli and his friend Cyrus leave their home in the legacy city of Seattle to go to the Olympic village in the ascender city of Los Angeles, the pace of the books picks up greatly and the true reality of this world is revealed to be a far more complex one than it seems at first, as are Eli's origins and it is this latter part of the book that firmly lays the foundations for subsequent books in the series.

The narrator gave quite a subtle performance, the various characters were generally distinctive enough without being too over the top and this resulted in a narration that nicely enhanced the overall story.

Overall, this was an interesting start to a series that should appeal to many people, particularly if they like the chosen one and hunger games kind of scenario.

[Note - I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.]

You voted on this review!

You reported this review!

1 person found this helpful