What's Left of Me by Kat Zhang

Each person is born with two souls.  The two souls share everything, from thoughts to feelings to control of the body.  But usually one soul is dominate, and as the person grows older, the weaker soul fades away.  But not always.  Eva was suppose to fade away long ago, and now Addie is the only one who knows she's still there. Eva can't speak or move, she can only communicate with Addie.  When a chance comes for Eva to regain some control, Addie and Eva must decide if it's worth the risk.

 This seems like a very promising start to a series.  It was something a little bit different.  Yes, it's still sci fi book about kids trying to overthrow the government with a romance element, but it was different enough to make it fresh and exciting.  And it's kind of cool that the love triangle is actually just between two people.  It's just that only one of the souls in each person is attracted to the other.  Drama!

This was mostly Eva's story, the soul that doesn't have control over her body.  Eva is portrayed as more of a thinker, quieter, softer, while Addie is stronger with a shorter temper.  Addie is the dominate soul, but she relies on Eva a lot to help her figure things out.  We spend much more time with Eva's thoughts and feelings then we do Addie's

I wanted more world building (of course).  I almost always want more world building.  We get to know very little about the world Addie and Eva inhabit.  We know they are living in America, but it isn't clear if it's an alternate America or an America of the future.  If it's an America of the future, what happened that caused people to start being born with two souls?  We know very little of the political situation inside or outside America.  This part, I assume, was intentional, as there's a bit of a dramatic reveal at the end about the world outside of America, so I have hopes that things will be more threshed out in books to come.

Spoilers
But oh, I have so many questions.  This whole dual soul thing creates endless problems that I will be interested to see how Kat Zhang addresses them, and if she does address them.  She's created a pretty complex society.  It's reveled that souls have the ability to go away for a while, leaving one soul alone for intimate moments and the like.  So is that how society is outside of America, where they've decided two souls is bad (and why did they decided that two souls were bad, assuming the government is lying about the wars)?  Each soul gets some time alone?  Does everyone have two jobs?  Two significant others?  How about children?  How do they figure out splitting time?  It's all very confusing, and I'm curious to see what happens.

What's Left of Me comes out September 18, 2012.