Once Upon a Twilight!: Blog Tour: Expiration Day | William Campbell Powell | Review

Welcome to our stop on EXPIRATION DAY tour for William Campbell Powell. This tour is hosted by Book Nerd Tours. Today we share our 3.5 star review plus much more.

Expiration Day
Author: William Campbell Powell
Reading Level: Young Adult
Genre: Science Fiction | Dystopia
Released: December 2, 2013
Review Source: Blog Tour

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.

From the first pages of Expiration Day we come to know, through Tania’s diaries, the existence of robots. Robots that can do just about anything a human being can do. But what Tania comes to learn is the new term of Teknoid – “from the Greek ‘teknon,’ meaning a child.” The existence of a type of androids in which specifically looks like a child. And these were invented because now human beings have a hard time having children. Ever since then, she becomes conscious of her surroundings, trying to figure out who is human and which are the Teknoid. She believes she is among one of the very few children left… until one day an accident reveals her true identity...

I’d read very few books dealing robots and I found Expiration Day very interesting. The fact that there aren’t many children left in the world is pretty darn scary. Let alone, thinking all your life you’re a human being just to find out you’re not. Tania becomes obsessed in learning more about her identity, which I don’t blame her at all. I would do the same. But as she begins learning more about world and new identity, she discovers she must be careful not to get in trouble with the law.

Although her entries were a bit slow for me, especially when she was at a younger age, I wanted to know why there are very few children left. I found the answers well explained and intriguer me as a reader to research these references. I mean, we all have fear at one point of the day machines will take over the world. Which is why I found this very interesting. Overall, Expiration Day is unique, well researched, and a good robot-based read.

William Campbell Powell was born in 1958 in Sheffield, but grew up in and around Birmingham. He was educated at King Edward’s School, Birmingham, and gained a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge to study Natural Sciences. Leaving Clare College in 1980 with a BA in Computer Science, he entered the computer industry, which is where he has been ever since.

William has been writing since 2002, experimenting with various genres, but he is most at home with Science Fiction, Historical Fiction and fiction for Young Adults.