I love the cyberpunk genre - let me say that right off the bat. Although there were parts where the story was a little slow, I really enjoyed diving right into this alternate-history-cyberpunk book. The characters had a lot of depth (whether you liked them or not), and the world was richly described. It's clear the author spent a lot of time building up the book's universe. Mental illness is a big part of the story, and the way others react to it is so realistic it almost hurts at times. Perfect for cyberpunk lovers!

The writing in this book was stellar! So much so that it immersed me in the curious alternate world that appears utopian, but is hiding ugly truths.

Some individuals suffer from mirror resonance syndrome like our MC, Victor. He is known as a broken mirror. This official classification would take away his autonomy.

Victor attempts to solve the murder of his grandfather while uncovering secrets about his condition. Not knowing who to trust, and often not trusting his own “broken” perception of reality, Victor pushes forward to find the truth.

This is not a romance, but a great mystery set in a captivating alternate reality. The tension and the writing truly made this book for me!

I wanted to give something different a try and i think i was just not the perfect audience for this book since a lot of the things in this book where just completely unbelievable to me. But i am 100% sure that it one of those moments where it is clearly me and not the book.

so its hard to review a book that i personally didn't enjoy because its just not my type of book. I guess you should try it yourself and see if its for your or not.

Solid world building and really cool writing style whit the descriptions of synesthesia. Slightly episodic and repetitive, but overall really fun to read.

*This book was given to me in exchange for an honest review and is rated 18+

After the death of his grandfather, Victor is convinced he was murdered. But nobody believes him due to his diagnosis of mirror resonance syndrome, which causes blackouts, nightmares, hallucinations, and a lack of control over strong emotions. Determined to discover the truth, Victor no longer knows who to trust as not only his condition worsens but a dangerous conspiracy involving a possible cure and a plot to lock up any broken mirror whether they're a threat or not.

This is a great cyberpunk thriller. Set in a dystopian, 1990's, you get this futuristic feel and the stakes make it tense but there are moments that drag as the next twist is set up. I really felt for Victor and I think you'll find yourself rooting for him the entire book, as I did. The world around him is built perfectly within the narrative making the entire story engrossing and engaging. An awesome novel worth checking out. 4 out of 5.

broken mirror by Cody sisco.
Someone killed Granfa Jefferson. Victor is sure of it. But he's the only one.

Diagnosed with mirror resonance syndrome and shunned by Semiautonomous California society, Victor suffers from "blank outs," hallucinations, and vivid nightmares. He violently overreacts to even minor confrontations. Victor's grandfather devoted his life to researching and curing Broken Mirrors, but now that he's gone, Victor must walk a narrow path between sanity and reclassification--a fate that all but guarantees he'll lose his freedom.
This was a slow but good read. had to put it down then pick it up again to finish it. so only 4*.

I didn't like it as much as I had hoped to. It was mostly okay but not really my cup of tea. I had some issues really getting into this story.

TW: racist comments (challenged)
slurs used at those with mental illness (sometimes challenged)</i>

This book was something else and I mean that in a good way. it had a lot of information in it and I felt like it was trying to take a lot of different stances. Which is good but I think it tried to do too much. It tried to end several stigmas about mental illness, along with racism and the LGBTQIA+ community. But regardless of all that, I still enjoyed this book and the experience of reading it.

Our MC, Victor, has mirror resonance syndrome. It gives a long explanation about what it is in the book but in laymen's terms, it's like autism. Victor reacts to things with a lot more emotion than the situation calls for. A lot of stimuli affects him negatively and positively. I have no experience in autism so I apologize in advance if I word things wrong or offend anyone in anyway. But that is what I thought when I read this book. Maybe the author modeled MRS after autism. I thought it was well done, but like I said, I can't be the judge of that completely.

The premise is that the Victor thinks his grandfather was murdered. Course, no one will believe him because he is a "broken mirror", a slur for those that have MRS. He enlists the help of an old friend, Elena and some of his grandfather's trusted friends to figure out the truth.

The POV is third person Victor with a few chapters of Elena. This made for the narration to be unreliable at times and I often wasn't sure who to trust nor could I always figure out what is going to happen. But I didn't mind that. I knew what I was getting into.

LIke I mentioned before, this book suffered from trying to do too much and holy information overload. There was just so much being given to me, I felt my eye gloss over a lot of the paragraphs and I had to go back to read what I missed. I like information but it was too much.

The main theme was mental illness. The stigma surroundings Victor's illness was incredibly reminiscent of what those with mental illness deal with today. Often times, while reading, I wanted to throw my Kindle because of what Victor had to go through. I think it triggered me in negative ways. As someone that has anxiety, my illness isn't often believed and my fears aren't always recognized. That is what Victor dealt with and it's infuriating. Even when he should growth and improvement, he was still shot down and was attempted to be controlled.

Racism was in this book as well. Victor was POC and sometimes dealt with the backlash of being from a successful family and being a POC. Sexuality was also addressed, but in a more positive light. According to Victor, almost everyone was duophile, which I think is bisexuality. A side character was adrophile, which I think is asexuality but I'm not sure.

Speaking of characters and side characters, I really only liked Victor. He was likeable and was always trying and pushing himself and get better. Even though his family and a lot of his "friends" weren't helping him. That is admirable of him and I only hope he continues to grow. Elena, who was kind of a MC, wasn't that great. I liked her at first but I think the relationship between her and Victor was toxic.

Overall, this was a great book! The world was cool, despite some info dumping. There could easily be side books and other things like that made because the world is large and so is the history behind it. The author tried very hard to dispel several horrible stigmas, which was admirable of him and I commend him. I really think that this series can only go up from here.

DNF at 20%
Okay so this is very much a 'it's not you, it's me' scenario.
I really wanted to like this Broken Mirror, it has so much promise and I loved Victor.
It was just so very sciencey, I've never been very good at science, and so everything went over my head and I couldn't understand half the things anyone was saying.
This is probably a great book, it just wasn't for me.

I was initially interested in this book because I found it in the LGBT section, but these themes aren't really explored and there's only a couple a throw away sentence with brief mentions of flirting between men. Despite the initial disappointment in this respect, I actually really enjoyed the book. The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 was rather expository and read more like the coming of age story of an unreliable narrator, but Parts 2 and 3 were very exciting with unexpected developments around every corner. I haven't read too much sci-fi or too many thrillers before this, but Parts 2 and 3 felt like a cyberpunk thriller to me. The story also had some strong literary elements, with interesting commentary on family, racism, and ableism, in addition to some motifs. I really enjoyed the "fiction as non-fiction" excerpts at the beginning of each chapter. These contributed to the exposition without boring and as the story progressed they sometimes even raised more questions than answers, which contributed to the story's energy. The book wasn't perfect by any means, but few books bring me the same pulse pounding anticipation that Broken Mirror did when the stakes rose, so it's earned all 5 of its stars.

Note that this is from an advance review copy for which I thank the publisher.

I didn't know this was "the first novel in a sci-fi detective saga"! If I had, the very word 'saga' would have resulted in me avoiding it like the plague, and I would have been right to do so, because I simply could not get into this novel and I discontinued reading it at the end of part one, which was about one third the way through it. keep tha tin mind for this review. I don't read anything with 'saga' or 'chronicle', or 'cycle' associated with it! I'm not a series fan in general, with very few exceptions, but I did not know that when I requested this, so here we are!

This is an alternate universe world set slightly into our future (but dated earlier), and one where the United States is a fractious union of a handful of regions. How this came about as a result of Mrs Lincoln being shot instead of Abraham Lincoln is a bit of a mystery to me. Maybe if I'd read more, or felt more engaged, it would have all become clear, but the way the country was divided-up made no sense to me.

In this world, there's a problem with some citizens. Mirror neurons are thought to enable empathy, allowing us to feel what another person is feeling, and understand it from the inside, but in this world, in people like Victor, this normal brain function is amplified almost out of control. Indeed, some people do get out of control, and are confined in institutions for the well-being of themselves and others. Victor himself constantly lives on the edge of that confinement, although he is free and managing his condition through medication.

His grandfather dies unexpectedly and Victor discovers that the man was contaminated with polonium: the same radioactive metal which was used to assassinate Russian defector Alexander Litvinenko in our world. Victor relied heavily on his grandfather, who was working to find a cure for the extreme version of what is, in us, not only a normal, but a required brain function if we're to get along with others. A mirror neuron fires when we perform an action or experience a feeling, and this same neuron also fires when we observe that same thing in others. At least that's the working theory, but there is still much research to be done to understand these brain cells properly.

Again if I'd read more, maybe I would have understood the world better, but after reading some thirty percent I still felt completely lost and had no interest in events in this novel. The story seemed to have no real direction other than flapping in the wind around Victor's wild speculations and erratic behaviors. Wherever it was going, it seemed to be taking forever to get there, and this is just one volume. The idea of reading a whole series, or even just a trilogy of this stuff really turns me off!

The worst part was that I did not like Victor at all. I don't know what it was about him, but he just did not interest me in the slightest. I think part of the problem was that his behavior was too erratic, and his plan to get off his medication and try herbal supplements was just stupid and had no support - not only in our world for real, but even within the framework of his own world, where nothing was offered to justify this medication realignment, save for his own vague feeling of being a bit 'fuzzy'.

I'd have liked it better had he had some real justification, but he didn't (and in real life you'd be a moron to abandon your doctor's prescriptions and go haring-off after herbal cures, be warned!). The problem here though, was that even when the fuzziness vanished, he was still a complete clown, and really seemed no different to me than he was before.

The bottom line is that I had absolutely no interest in him or his problems, and I really didn't care what became of him. After I'd decided I could not recommend this book, I read some other reviews to see if I'd missed something, and I read one which said that the novel "started bogging down about 3/4 of the way through" - well it started way before that for me, and so i was pleased that I'd abandoned it before it got worse.

The characters were not the only problem for me, though. The story dragged awfully, larded with so much extraneous detail that it was boring to wade through it. Nothing seemed to happen except at a glacial pace (it's a series after all, so what possible incentive can the author have to actually move things along?).

There was also too much fluff in it for my taste. All kinds of word substitutions were put in play to try and make the novel seem different and alternate, and these didn't work. 'Mesh' instead of Internet? 'Sono-whatever' instead of audio? They just seemed pretentious, and felt like a lazy way to try and make the story sound cool without actually doing the work to make it cool. All they did was remind me that I was reading a story instead of actually immersing me in the story.

Why were there 'parts' to this novel - especially since it's evidently part of a series? Parts of a part? When I finished part one, I expected there to be a shift of some kind between it and part two, otherwise why set up a divider? But there wasn't! The novel was set in the early 1990's in that world timeline, but part two continued just two days later! There was no jump or shift of any kind, and it was this which constituted the final straw and made me decide that here was a good point to quit reading.

It just seemed so pretentious to have these parts (at least they were identified as 'Part' and not 'Book' which I would have found laughable), but it wasn't quite as pretentious as having each chapter labeled with a dateline such as "Semiautonomous California 23 February 1991." Several chapters in a row had this same dateline. Why? It made no sense. I felt like it was a silly conceit of unwarranted self-importance, and this became especially true in chapter 6, where the dateline "Semiautonomous California 23 February 1991" was used (as it had been for the preceding three chapters), yet most of that chapter was a flashback, which was given neither date nor a location! It made zero sense!

Here's another example of how silly this was:

Semiautonomous California 24 February 1991

The morning after the funeral...

Well duh! Of course it's the day after! The dateline already told us! So what was the point of the dateline again?! Or conversely, what's the point of specifying it was the day after if the dateline already told us? I got the impression that the author had seen this dateline nonsense done in someone else's novel, and was anxious to copy it without having any real justification for it. Of course I could be completely wrong about that, but I see no justification for this kind of thing in any novel, unless the novel is written as a diary, in which case I wouldn't read it anyway.

So given a novel with a main character I really could not stand, and a story which seemed to be going nowhere slowly, and the pretension in the way it was laid out, this novel was not a good fit for me! It offered nothing to appeal, and while I wish the author all the best, I cannot recommend it for these reasons.

2017 continues to be the year of outstanding sci-fi novels!

I don't know what the hell I was expecting, but it sure wasn't this. I mean, not to generalise, but when you download one of those auto-approval thingys from Netgalley, you aren't expecting a masterpiece, are you?

But that's what I got. A complete masterpiece.

The worldbuilding was extremely good and well-developed without info-dumping, and bits and piece of the world were woven in throughout the narrative so your knowledge builds up throughout the novel rather than just beginning the novel like "ok here's the deal" which is what a lot of spec-fic writers do. This is a relatively long novel, not super long but a bit longer than average, yet no part dragged at all; the pacing was perfect and the suspense was drawn out throughout the book. There were one hundred million gazillion kersquillion plot twists and every character was so complex, and intriguing, and flawed.

It ended on a cliffhanger and I still have nine thousand theories and questions, but at the same time I'm not dissatisfied with how it ended. It was the perfect beginning to a series and I need every following volume to be published immediately, thanks.

Thanks to Netgalley for making this available. I didn’t see the Goodreads blurb which was a bit more in depth as I didn’t know it was alternative history and cyberpunk neither of which are my genres. I might have skipped it had I known. That said, I did like it and if I were more of a fan of those genres I might have really loved it.

In this alternative history, the Civil War ended with the death of Mrs. Lincoln, not Abe and they decided in the rebuilding period that skin color didn’t matter (we should be so lucky) but on the other hand, there was no strong United States, instead it’s a fractured country of regions that may or may not get along. Our main protagonist Victor Eastmore, lives in the California area and his grandfather was instrumental in curing cancer and he’s working on a neurological condition Mirror Resonance Syndrome, i.e. the titular Broken Mirror. It’s like a cross between high function autism, synesthesia and absence seizures.

Victor is a Broken Mirror but to his horror, his grandfather shuts down their hospital and research and soon after he’s dead. Victor believes his beloved grandfather was murdered. Not only does no one believe him, including his family, his grandmother wants him arrested and institutionalized. Here’s the main plot of the novel: how horrible it is to stigmatize mental illness and to rise above it. Of course, in order to end something, that means it has to exist and boy does it ever in this. The whole background of the novel is about how horribly these neuro-atypical ‘broken mirrors’ are treated even Victor who is wealthy and from a respected family. In fact he’s facing being reclassified and locked away (a system born of a massacre waged by one person with this syndrome, it would be like one mass shooting by a schizophrenic resulting in all people with schizophrenia being brought in several times a year to pass a test or be locked away).

With his condition, Victor is starting this investigation into his grandfather’s death behind the eight ball. All he has for help is a data egg from his grandfather that won’t open, his ex-girlfriend Elena who’s back in his life, his former friend Ozie a brain hacker he lost touch with and Tosh, a Native American friend of his grandfather Victor has never met. The problem is everyone has their own agenda (including his boss and his Aunt Circe) and Victor is manipulated at every turn.

It was a bit slow to start and only a small part of the mystery is solved by the end. I did like Victor. He makes for a sympathetic character. Once the story really gets moving, it rolls on well. I just wish the rest of the characters were a bit more likeable. I rather wished Victor would have dumped them all and run off on his own. One thing did bug me: It was listed as LGBTQIA and honestly there is almost none of that. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t need the character to be in a relationship as that’s just a part of who they are but all we had here was literally one sentence saying Victor is bisexual. I’m fine with him being in a committed (sort of) heterosexual relationship but he doesn’t even correct Tosh when he says Victor obviously likes girls (even though Tosh is the one he told he was bi). Maybe there’ll be more on the spectrum in further novels but if you’re picking this up hoping for a hot gay relationship, you’re going to be very disappointed. That’s not this novel. In fact, I would have put Victor under asexual.

It does, however, do well on the diversity spectrum. Ozie is African, Elena Hispanic and Victor is mixed race. I liked the story and if you like cyberpunk you’ll probably enjoy it.

it had good twists and turns... the plot wasnt my favorite but the writing was really good so it did make it interesting to read. it did feel like there might need to be another one but im not sure if there is going to be or not. overall i am glad i got to review it

I’m new to the cyberpunk genre, but I’ve been wanting to give it more of a try, and this one sounded good. Unfortunately, although the book was well-written, I struggled to really get into it.

So, this book was a cyberpunk/alternate history mash-up set in the early 90s in a different version of the U.S. with a kind of bleak feel. That was pretty neat, but, because the world was so different, there was A LOT of description of settings, science and technology, and the alternate world (history, backstory, politics, businesses, religion, geography, etc.). Also, every chapter started with a statement of some sort, like a press statement, an excerpt from a magazine article, something from Victor’s psychiatrist, or something else from the world of the book. On the one hand, I admired all the depth and detail because it’s clear this was a well thought-out world and story. But on the other hand, I’m someone who almost never skims, and I skimmed over most that that stuff. The good news though is that, even though I felt like the descriptions and history bogged down the story some, you don’t need to understand all those details in order to still understand the story and can skim like I did if you want to.

I also felt that the book was rather slow-paced, especially in the beginning. The flashbacks didn’t help with that, but thankfully those eventually stopped.

Something I’m kind of torn about is the characters. They were complex, but most of them weren’t particularly likeable. Elena was a judgmental jerk; she thought of Victor as a second-class citizen because of his mental illness (that’s how they were treated by society, and that’s not her fault, but she herself also thought that at one point), “watching him struggle made her feel more alive,” she referred to him as “insane” at one point, she lied to him, and she blamed him for the fact that she got addicted to stims (a drug) and then blamed him when she got addicted again because “living with a person with MRS should be classified as a medical condition meriting the strongest prescription available.” Tosh was a creepy pervert. Ozie was manipulative and secretive. Victor’s family just dismissed him because of his mental illness and wouldn’t listen to him even when he had proof of things. Granfa Jeff, even in death, managed to be cryptic even though it seems that just telling people things would’ve saved a whole lot of trouble. Even people on the street and in public places were jerks. I think Chico may have been my favorite character despite the fact that he had like three lines, all of which were said while he was bleeding out from a knife wound.

Then again, I shouldn’t be complaining since I often feel characters in books are too nice and perfect, and these were just legitimately flawed, like real people (although thankfully I don’t know any real people like Tosh). And Victor (the main character and therefore the most important one) was a good character because I could sympathize with him and even relate in some ways, so he was likeable in that way even though he was flawed.

Last but not least, another good thing about the book was that there was a lot of focus on mental illness. Victor’s illness was a fictional one, it seemed kind of like a cross between synesthesia and schizophrenia with a touch of empath ability, so you won’t learn about actual mental illness from reading this, but the reactions and stigma toward his illness and the way he was treated because of it felt realistic.

So all in all, this was maybe not quite for me, but it had a very in-depth, thought-out alternate world and realistic, legitimately flawed characters, and I can see other readers who like both these things being able to sink into the book!