Imitation by Heather Hildenbrand Review

Imitation by Heather Hildenbrand

“Unfortunately good and evil aren’t as black and white as we’d like. The methods always look muddy to bystanders.”

Imitation is the story of Ven, a clone. Clones are created for people who have the money and are rich, to either use as a body double or to harvest their organs. Ven is the clone of Raven Rogen the daughter of Titus Rogen the RogenCorps organisation ceo– the creator of all clones. After an attack on Raven, Ven is sent to impersonate or imitate Raven in order to draw out the attackers, so basically she’s bait.

The book had a good start with Ven and her 2 friends being introduced, life at RogenCorps is shown with an insight into their restrained and observed lives. We see Ven and her personality as clones are put into trios and her trios consists of 3 girls with different personalities, also we see sessions in which Ven observes Raven to learn more about her.

Ven thinks very low of Raven. To Ven Raven is a shallow slut who lives off her dad’s money and only does stuff for attention. It’s disgusting how judgemental Ven is even after she sees life from Raven’s view – after Ven gets angry she realises she can relate to Raven which would show her how depressing Raven’s real life is but no she’d rather picture her as a snobby teenager. What made it worse is when the love interest slut shamed Raven – she never turned anybody down – get over yourself! Anyway Ven compared herself to Raven making Raven look bad and her look good and she did this by slut shaming and being judgemental.

The plot of the story was very similar to the movie The Island – the clones, the reasoning behind the clones and the entire bad system thing. I guess it’s an overused trend in clone books – it isn’t anything original. Plus the story was slow paced and dragged on too much.

What made the story awful was the romance. First of all – Instant love with a judgemental rude jerk (who does change) and then the quick falling in love. The novel started off well but as soon as the romance was introduced it took over the story – there was no need for a plot as the author focused on the romance. It was boring and I didn’t care as I wasn’t emotionally attached to the characters.

Lastly the ending was such a cliché – it was the typical meet the rebellion people and headquarters which set up the book for the plot of taking down the corrupt system.

★☆☆☆☆