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    Spare and Found Parts
    Spare and Found Parts
    Spare and Found Parts
    Audiobook9 hours

    Spare and Found Parts

    Written by Sarah Maria Griffin

    Narrated by Alana Kerr Collins and Alan Smyth

    3/5

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    About this audiobook

    Nell Crane has never held a boy’s hand. 

    In a city devastated by an epidemic, where survivors are all missing parts—an arm, a leg, an eye—Nell has always been an outsider. Her father is the famed scientist who created the biomechanical limbs that everyone now uses. But she’s the only one with her machinery on the inside: her heart. Since the childhood operation, she has ticked. Like a clock, like a bomb. And as her community rebuilds, everyone is expected to contribute to the society’s good . . . but how can Nell live up to her father’s revolutionary ideas when she has none of her own? 

    Then she finds a lost mannequin’s hand while salvaging on the beach, and inspiration strikes. Can Nell build her own companion in a world that fears advanced technology? The deeper she sinks into this plan, the more she learns about her city—and her father, who is hiding secret experiments of his own. 

    Sarah Maria Griffin’s haunting literary debut will entrance fans of Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking series, Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 4, 2016
    ISBN9780062570581
    Author

    Sarah Maria Griffin

    Sarah Maria Griffin lives in Dublin, Ireland, in a small red brick house by the sea, with her husband and cat. She writes about monsters, growing up, and everything those two things have in common. This is her first novel. You can visit her at www.sarahgriff.com.  

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    Reviews for Spare and Found Parts

    3/5

    34 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      It didn’t hold my attention the entire time but I appreciated how it was written and though it didn’t go the way I’d have liked, I still enjoyed it.
    • 3/5
      The story was like a Frankenstein retelling which was not what I was expecting. The story was good but the start was slow. I felt like this story was unfinished at the end.
    • 3/5
      I'd been reading it for a while and kept putting it down, I was about half-way through. Having just finished another book I decided to give it a go. And it started to take off and I finished it in a fairly short amount of time.This has got a fair amout of hype about being a retelling of Frankenstein, and it is. Also a tale of betrayal and a complicated world where technology broke and some sort of epidemic means that most people have some part of them that's artificial. Nell's the only one with an artificial heart. Her father is the man who built a lot of people's spare parts. Everyone is expected to prove why they should stay in the city (called Blackpool which is a literal translation of the Dublin or Dubh Linn name for the city) or be part of the rural support for the city. She's pulled everywhere by different people and the knowledge that was. She has to do something soon to prove her place in the world and when she finds a manequin's hand while salvaging on a beach she decides to build an artificial person.I wasn't sure when I was, it seemed that people had a memory of the time before but others didn't, who were the same age, and I felt like it wasn't clear enough. There was world building but the foundations felt insecure and tenuous and honestly while I don't regret reading it it wasn't my favourite read so far this year.
    • 3/5
      In a dystopian future where most technology has been abandoned due to it's causing massive conflict and pandemic, Nell Crane lives in the shadows of the legacies of her brilliant parents. A walking sign of her father's amazing inventiveness with her clockwork heart, Nell is determined to show the citizens of Black Water City that she is a genius in her own right. So when she finds a mannequin's hand washed up on the shore of the river it sparks Nell's imagination to wonder: what if she could build a person? One whose basis was the technology that has so long been banned? What would happen in the wake of such a creation?This one ended up on The List from a list of steampunk novels recommended by GoodReads and on that count it utterly fails. One clockwork heart does not a steampunk novel make. What this is, is an interpretation of [Frankenstein]. However, it's execution is far from perfect. While the concept is decent and the dystopian world Griffin creates is mysterious and intriguing, the characters are where things wobble. It's never clear just why Nell is so terrible at relating to people in one moment and several chapters later is completely adept at it (and then yo-yos between those two extremes several more times). However, in true Frankenstein fashion, the creation is the most interesting character around. Hesitantly recommended for Frankenstein and dystopia fans.