Not a good book by any means. Hamilton's writing is weak and a bit unpleasant to read. Compound that with a boring story and not much value can be found. Nevertheless, setting the story only a few decades in the future was interesting, if only the comment on England's role in the European Union was not so clearly forced.
I really have to be more careful about reading such erotic books while traveling... ( )

http://pro-libertate.net/20150421/261-read-misspent-youth ( )

An interesting premise with.uninspired execution. I wanted to read what life might be like for the first person made young again, but the actual story was banal and predictable.

This book is only 13 years old, but some of its ideas are already outdated. For instance, the author imagines a world where digital piracy has crippled creative industry to such a degree that new entertainment media can only be funded through product placement and embedded advertising. In the real world the scenario he imagines would be technologically possible, but it has not happened. In the time since this book has been written it has been demonstrated that many people will pay for things even when they could easily pirate them. Crowdfunding through services like Kickstarter and Patreon have shown some will even pay for things which don't yet exist and might never get made. ( )

A story about a completely reprehensible person and his mostly reprehensible family and friends in a near future England where government control and surveillance has gone too far. Rich people gone wrong should really be the title of this one, but it didn't make for great reading. The author actually warns us that some of the proof readers didn't like the characters - I should have listened!

Nothing wrong with the plot, writing or speculation on how tech will progress, I just hated the characters. ( )

A commonplace of recent "hard" SF is the idea of very long lifespans and rejuvenation of the body. Hamilton has used it himself in his space-opera series. Here he decides to make it the focus of a stand-alone novel, examining the impact on the very first recipient and his family.

My usual complaint about Hamilton is that his stories have no subtext at all but that cannot be said of this novel of loose morals and really bad behaviour. Unfortunately the message seems rather underwhelming; if you behaved badly when you were twenty and you suddenly go from being 70 to being twenty again - you'll behave badly again. The type of behaviour is not unrealistic in that similar disasters do occur in step-families.

The characters spend so much time having sex that it gets tedious but there are some other things going on; one is a theme of a Federal Europe that has become a target of multiple terrorist seperatist groups from various formerly independent states. The society is shown as repressive and only nominally democratic. This could be merely a projection of current European trends for the sake of background and plot but it feels more like a Dystopian Warning.

These days when an SF novel focuses centrally on a Major Medical Breakthrough I expect that near the end it will unravel, either killing the recipient or leaving him exactly where he started. These seem like just a Deus Ex Machina that allows the author to quit once bored and the predictability is greatly detrimental to the overall impact of the book. This one is not an exception. ( )