Upgrade – Blake Crouch

At first, Logan Ramsay isn’t sure if anything’s different. He just feels a little . . . sharper. Better able to concentrate. Better at multitasking. Reading a bit faster, memorizing better, needing less sleep.

But before long, he can’t deny it: Something’s happening to his brain. To his body. He’s starting to see the world, and those around him—even those he loves most—in whole new ways.

The truth is, Logan’s genome has been hacked. And there’s a reason he’s been targeted for this upgrade. A reason that goes back decades to the darkest part of his past, and a horrific family legacy.

Worse still, what’s happening to him is just the first step in a much larger plan, one that will inflict the same changes on humanity at large—at a terrifying cost.

Because of his new abilities, Logan’s the one person in the world capable of stopping what’s been set in motion. But to have a chance at winning this war, he’ll have to become something other than himself. Maybe even something other than human.

And even as he’s fighting, he can’t help wondering: what if humanity’s only hope for a future really does lie in engineering our own evolution?

Intimate in scale yet epic in scope, Upgrade is an intricately plotted, lightning-fast tale that charts one man’s thrilling transformation, even as it asks us to ponder the limits of our humanity—and our boundless potential.

BOOK REVIEW

After loving DARK MATTER and RECURSION from Blake Crouch, I am always up for another one of his sci-fi thrillers! I’ve said before that I felt like those two books were a little too smart for me and UPGRADE felt much more accessible. There were still a lot of science talk that was on another level but it wasn’t quite as mind-bending as the other two books!

Blake Crouch’s sci-fi thrillers are always fun reads. I always connect with the characters but UPGRADE also felt like it focused a lot more on the main character since it really was all about him, instead of digging deeper into the science aspects and spending time on world-building. Logan was a fun character to follow! He was likable, but not all that special, until one day…. he is. He ends up being turned into a sort of super-human and I liked watching his journey as he not only figured out how to handle all of his new abilities but the morality struggles of what to do with them, what to do to the person who inflicted them upon him, and how to resolve the situations that arise once people figure out exactly what he can do.

The ending was a little bit of a let down for me, mostly because it just didn’t pack any punch that I was still waiting and hoping for like Crouch’s other reads, but it was a fun journey and always an engaging experience. There wasn’t really a crazy, mind-blowing twist, but I was also okay with that too! I was expecting it so it was a little more of a quiet ending than I expected, but I also liked the little break from what I would expect from Blake Crouch’s books so they don’t get too formulaic.