Redheaded Reviews: Soulprint by Megan Miranda

Alina Chase is being held on an island in a pretty prison not for a crime she committed but because of a crime that was committed in her past life as June Calahan. June and a guy named Liam White broke into the Alonzo-Carter Cybersecurity Data Center in order to announce who could possibly be a dangerous criminal based on their past lives. Scientists had done studies that had determined that you passed on such traits as handedness, intelligence, and behavior. The two go on the run and Liam is shot down by the police when he reaches for his cell phone and a year later June is killed when she comes out of hiding.

Immediately after June was killed, scientists tested babies in a 100-mile radius to find out where June's soul ended up. As a baby, Alina had a tracking device inserted into her. Her mother was arrested when she tried to remove it. Her father dropped her off at the hospital because he could not handle raising her alone with all of the outside pressure. When the two of them try to get her back, they are unable to do so and Alina is sent to the island where she is told she will be set free at first this age then the age keeps getting pushed up as she gets older. At the age of ten, a guard tries to help her escape but fails and this is when Alina first gets the idea to try to find a way off the island.

While doing her biology homework, she discovers a hidden message in the assignment and responds to it. This goes on back and forth for a while with plans being made on the outside to get her out of her prison. From her end, the plans are very vague. On her seventeenth birthday, the big day, she goes to her bathroom, where there are no cameras and finds a young man, Cameron, who has a press badge and is there to take out her tracking device. The girl he is with, Casey, is the person Alina will next meet at the door of her room, as she is a guard. When the press arrives to take pictures and hear a speech and ask questions, Alina and Casey move forward as though to speak to them, when an explosion occurs in her room causing panic. Alina and Casey run to a cliff where they meet Cameron and Alina is supposed to jump over the cliff. The only problem is that Alina does not know how to swim, so Cameron goes with Alina and Casey, dressed like Alina in a wig, runs away with the tracker to lead the guards away. After they jump into the water, they meet Dom who is wearing a full scuba gear and gets them one set of scuba gear to share.

When they get to the meeting point Alina finds out who Dom is and wonders if she can really trust any of them. Why did they break her out of her prison? There is definitely a reason and it is not altruistic, though they each have different reasons. They are all on the run now from the police and the government and others. For a while, they decide to hide in plain sight, but that can only work for so long as soon enough people are going to want to turn her in for the reward money. They all seem to buy into the idea that she IS June reincarnated and therefore knows everything June does and have her wondering if that isn't true. So what is Dom's endgame?

This book makes you question whether or not you can overcome a past life or just the things you've done in this life. At the age of eighteen, anyone can find out what their past life is and all the details held therein. Parents can do it for their children. But do we really want to know? Is it relevant? Are we the sum of our past lives, or do we change over the course of them, or is there no connection whatsoever between each past life? This book will really make you think and has a great deal of action and a hint of romance, as Alina and Cameron are attracted to each other. It also makes you wonder what is the cost of such knowledge.

Quotes

So you see, it’s not just the past life that can come back to haunt you. It’s the past in this life, too.

-Megan Miranda (Soulprint p 190)

School is not how I pictured, or maybe it’s different when it’s completely empty. It’s more like how I imagine an empty jail, or some asylum, and everything about me echoes still.

-Megan Miranda (Soulprint p 210)

I try to focus, but instead my mind keeps replaying Cameron’s face the second before he kissed me. And then the kiss. And I can’t unfocus from it. I have decided it’s really unfair. I should get to decide what my mind thinks about, and not the other way around…

-Megan Miranda (Soulprint p 230)

I’m lost in a daydream—it’s so real I can feel it take shape inside me, and I know how dangerous this is, I know. How hope can spread, how it multiplies when you linger in it. How it works its way into your life, before you remember that it’s not real. How insidious hope can become if you let it.

-Megan Miranda (Soulprint p. 248-9)

“Whoever lives here better realize how lucky they are,” I say. “A house doesn’t make people lucky.” “But the people in it,” I say, “the people you live with.” He cringes and then gestures to me. “Some people never know their parents and wish they did. But some people do know their parents and wish they didn’t. No house in the world wouldn’t have changed that,” he says.

-Megan Miranda (Soulprint p 251)

The windows up front are tinted. And I think, He has found us the perfect car, because he is perfect. And I wonder if people do this all the time: fall for people because of their ability to pick getaway cars; or fall for people because of the way they look when they think nobody is watching; or fall for people because of the things they say, or the way they look at them, or the things they give up, or the things they cannot do. I thought it was because of hair and eyes and a sense of humor, or similar personalities and common interests—but it’s not. It’s the ability to pick getaway cars. To weigh crimes. To take the risk on someone again, even when he’s been betrayed once before. To have faith in himself and in me. To see me.

-Megan Miranda (Soulprint p 262)

Data can be used however one sees fit to twist it. The truth can be anything. We are dealing with human beings here. There’s no control for a human being. Way too many variables. It could be the truth. Evil is evil, Alina, there’s no other explanation.

-Megan Mirada (Soulprint p 289)

“I don’t care,” I say. But that’s not exactly true. It’s more that there are degrees of caring, and degrees of truth, and what you want and what you need are very rarely the same thing.

-Megan Miranda (Soulprint p 317)

It may save me this time, public opinion. Which is all law really is, anyway. We make our laws, and then we must suffer for them.

-Megan Miranda (Soulprint p 341)

There’s no pattern to falling in love. At least, nothing I can understand. Not something I could see beforehand. Not something I can decipher after, either. Trust can be earned, piece by piece, like links in a chain. But love is more like faith, or belief: it’s a leap. It’s hurtling over the edge of the cliff and trusting you will not drown.

-Megan Miranda (Soulprint p 351)