Upgrade

I originally for some reason thought this released much sooner in the year, which made it even harder to wait for July. This author has been an auto-buy for me since Dark Matter so I couldn't wait for this one. 
Upgrade is a science fiction novel that reads like scifi-realism (if that's a thing?) and scifi/dystopia. For me this is my sweet spot for the genre, which is why the author has catapulted to a favorite. His novels are accessible to anyone, but with science just smart enough to make me feel stupid, which to me at least, feels more real seeing as I am not a scientist. And I link each one to dystopian because he has such a way about writing things that are evolutions of where we are now, nothing ever seems ridiculous or impossible, but they are most often bleak. 
For me this is some of Crouch's best writing, even from the first page, there's just something refreshing about how he tells stories. I've always particularly liked that his main characters are not typical, they are never young or special, they are typically around 40 and ultimately average. Yet they often face the same odds and events that you would get in a chosen-one type story. 
Overall Upgrade is the story of what it means to be human, humanity itself, and a cry for compassion in the world. The author knows we need to act in terms of conservation, and this novel takes place in the future, a future that looks like our own, but it doesn't read like that, it's not so one dimensional. 
Through and through this is a wild ride, it's compulsively readable, unputdownable, and anything else you'd like to call it. Yes, there's a lot of science and description, but this one is also filled with incredible action and pacing. An absolute must. 
Personally a 5/5*, probably my favorite read this year.