The Organ Scrubber (Defragmenting Daniel, book 1)

By Jason Werbeloff

Blurb: 
hey harvested his organs. Now he’ll reap what they’ve sown.
The Gutter orphanage, 2064. As a child, Daniel had no choice but to trade his body parts for room and board. Now more synthetic than human, he’s barely survived to see his 18th birthday. Finally free from captivity, he uncovers the terrible truth of his origins… and an unfulfilled legacy of revenge.

Daniel’s organs still live on in the bodies of the powerful elite who stole his childhood. And he won’t stop until he’s harvested every last one. To reclaim his rightful parts, he's forced to cross over into a heavily fortified and unfamiliar world. With the authorities hot on his trail, Daniel must fulfill his bloody quest before his broken body takes its final breath.

Defragmenting Daniel: The Organ Scrubber is the first book in a provocative sci-fi thriller trilogy. If you like high-tech dystopian worlds, eccentric characters, and pulse-pounding action, then you’ll love Jason Werbeloff’s visceral novel.

Review: 
Daniel is an organ scrubber, this job literally is just scrubbing organs with some green liquid, I can't remember the name of it but everyone uses it to clean them. The organs he deals with are ones that are no longer needed or have problems. He works with a girl called Hooplah (strange name in my opinion, never heard anyone called that before) they play games with the organs and do weird stuff with them. They have competitions with each other on how many they can clean a day.

The main story kicks off on Daniels 18th birthday, on his birthday he gets to go to administration to pick up his file to tell him who his parents are. He isn't sure who his parents are because he is an orphan like Hooplah, hence why they are such good friends and seem to have clicked quite well. The day of his birthday he only cleaned 48 organs when he likes to do things in a multiple of 7, so you can imagine he was thinking things were going to go downhill from there on.

He goes to adminstration to collect his file when he finds out that he can't get it, because he hasn't paid 3 months rent for his flat, so he has to donate another organ the next morning to be able to get it.

He finally gets it and goes on a hunt to find his mother when he discovers a few problems along the way. He does discover the reason why he is so obsessed with things in multiple of 7 which I found very interesting, but from this moment onwards he discovers something that turns his life around and makes him go on a hunt for his organs.

I found the twist in the story very sweet and symbolic, I thought it was a nice touch with why he wanted to find his organs. The reason behind it made me respect him a lot more because it proves how much he loves his mother even though he was never brought up by her.

The story from this point onwards seemed to develop really well and I enjoyed the adventure and coming across the several challenges that he had to face along the way.

I felt Daniel's character was well developed and I really felt connected to him. I would have liked his friendship with Hooplah to have been more developed or in more detail to start of with, but I may discover more about it in the other books.

Just over half way through the book we come across another character, who we start to get an insight of and we start to get their point of view as chapters. I thought this was a nice change to the book and was well placed. By introducing this character at this time it increased the suspense and made me want to read much quicker cause I really wanted to know what happened next. So guess what happened, I read quicker!

Kage who is the second main character is a private investigator, he is in the process of going through a sex change and getting all of the organs from a secondhand dealer, who seems to be charging the earth. Kage is spending all of his money trying to become a man and has no longer got a flat to live in as he is spending every penny on organs and testosterone. 

This part of the story really hit me because one of my friends was in this situation when he was younger, and turned to drugs for help because he didn't get the support he needed, thankfully he has just started taking the testosterone and getting his life back on track. Just like Kage not getting the support he needs from his work colleagues and friends. I just find it horrible how much people are against this, people are allowed to be who they want to be and if people feel like they were born into the wrong body support them and help them in anyway that you can. Sorry I kind of got away with my emotions there, certain subjects in books make me really annoyed. 

The sci-fi within the book wasn't that much advanced either, so it was quite believable, I also liked the touch that if you were from the gutter not the bubble you couldn't see all the technology things like the forcefields that allowed items to hide. I really like the idea of having a picture food option, so when you selected an item of food you got it and it was already cooked and ready to eat. That would just save so much time especially when your on a tight schedule. The idea of anti-gravity taxis was quite good but my worry would be do they pollute the earth. So Jason Werbloff do they? How do they work? Also the glasses headset that allow you to reply to texts and doing shopping, I can definitely see this happened in the future, I wouldn't like it personally but it seems a good idea.

I found the ending of this book was quite fitting to be honest, at the start of the last chapter I guessed that would be the ending. I think I will be reading the second book but I couldn't say when, hopefully soon.

There was one main thing that I didn't like about this book and that was the secual content. I have let this effect the star rating because I'm not keen on too much sexual content, so I apologise to the author for this but it did effect my enjoyment. I didn't mind Florrenza being a prostitute but when a few of the scenes were described about hearing the guys ejaculate while eating was quite weird and a bit off putting. For then later on in the book to read about a rape was very disturbing and I really didn't like this. The other sexual scenes of prostitute adverts in the taxi within the bubble, and then the description of Thomsin's house was just ridiculous in my opinion. But I pushed past all these sex scenes to see how the actual book was, I almost gave up at times especially round the rape scene.

Overall, I would recommend this book if you don't mind sexual content, love sci-fi, weird gruesome blood, muder, creepy robots but mainly a good adventure story that is full of suspense that's fast paced.

Favourite Character: Daniel

Read: 06/08/18 - 08/08/18

3 stars out of 5

Check out book 1: The Face in a Jar

written by Sammie