Who wouldn't like an "Upgrade"? No, not your house, your job, or your seat on a plane, but in your health, your strength, your memory, and your mind? I know I would!

I really liked two of this author's other books, "Dark Matter" and "Recursion" and this book was equally as thrilling. This is a captivating futuristic science fiction/fantasy novel. The main character is a victim of an explosion that infiltrates his body with a virus that causes a modification or "upgrade" in his genes, that result in him becoming almost superhuman. However, this may not be as good as it sounds. There is also some family drama and conflict involved, but you'll have to read this thriller to find out how everything is resolved. If you enjoy a book with high octane excitement, you won't want to miss this one.

My sincere thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group - Ballantine Books for giving me the opportunity to read a digital ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review. I am posting this review to my Goodreads and NetGalley accounts immediately and will post it on Amazon and B&N upon publication on July 12, 2022.

Crouch has become an instant pre-order for me. I never considered myself a sci-go fan but something about the way Crouch creates these worlds that feel real with characters that you really find yourself rooting just keeps me coming back. Upgrade is no exception to this. While I thought it was a bit weaker than his last few books, I will absolutely be adding this to my personal library. Fun, devastating, and unique!

Alright, I admit it. I'm a Blake Crouch fan for life now and have to read his backlist titles. I didn't understand every single scientific principle, but I got the gist and really felt immersed in the story. I have a handful of patrons in mind already, so I've ordered a couple of copies. I think they're going to love it.

Blake Crouch has such a unique and interesting way to present information to his readers. His books are full of scientific principles that can e difficult for some to understand and comprehend. This can mean that readers may very well give up on finishing a book because of the way the content is provided by the author. This is an issue that Blake Crouch has seemed to solve. It doesn’t matter what type of information he is providing to his audience. It is presented in a way that is easily digestible to anyone and everyone.

Upgrade is a novel about the next logical evolution of humanity. Humanity is on a crash course with extinction and as much as the world sees it, they prefer to ignore it. When one scientist and her son decide to not ignore it and develop a solution, millions of people die. The results of this experiment changed the course of how gene therapy or modification for everyone. No one wanted to address the problem unless they were capable of doing it with little to no human casualty. Unfortunately, that is not always an option. A plan will not go of without a hitch. There is ALWAYS a possibility that something can go wrong. Murphy’s Law..

I love how Crouch was able to make even the antagonist relatable in readers eyes. You can not deny the course that humanity has chosen. While this may step into a wormhole for some readers, Crouch has made it possible to think about it from a logical perspective and provide a feasible solution. You become invested early on in the novel with the main character, Logan. When his sister enters the picture, you are able to relate to her as well. It is similar to seeing both sides of an argument from a unbiased perspective. The flow of the novel keeps the reader on the edge of their seat and their brain active as they fly through the unknown.

Huge thank you to Blake Crouch, Random House, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read M. Crouch’s latest novel “Upgrade” This novel was at the top of my TBR read list for 2022, and it was a huge honor to read it BEFORE the summer. Speaking of summer, this will be an awesome summer sci fi thriller to enjoy on your vacation or anywhere! Ever since “Dark Matter” I have been a bona fide Blake Crouch junkie. Like his previous novels there is plenty of thriller, but it is the science and research that puts his novels over the top. I always find myself highlighting and searching Wikipedia whenever I read a Blake Crouch novel. Like any good Sci Fi, the plot deals with themes that we are facing today, and asking what if? And what if anything can be done about it? Holding the mirror up to society. Not preachy, but making the reader think. Themes of DNA obviously and how we are evolving as humans and society. I enjoyed the novel on several levels, and yes, jammed packed with action to boot! I am also excited to find out from Mr. Crouch’s twitter feed that Dark Matter is in development to be a series, yes it is really happening! Look for “Upgrade” this summer, with a tentative release in July 2022, and Dark Matter hopefully in 2023 on a streaming service near you! Thanks for reading! And thanks for your time!

My first ARC!!! This was my second book by Blake Crouch and it did not disappoint! Once I started reading this I could not put it down. The main character was so well written and I loved reading his thought processes through this controversial subject. The DNA science was easy to follow but there were some science words that I had to look up for sure. The flow of the story was fantastic and the story/plot was almost plausible in our reality which I feel made it much more thrilling and nail-biting. Much like Recursion, my heart broke at a few scenes but that is what I love about Crouch's books, the humanity and emotion that comes out when facing a mind-blowing experiment on humankind and the constant fight to maintain a link to not only humanity as a whole but to your own humanity. Highly recommend this book!

In a near-future world, Logan Ramsay is the son of a geneticist who caused one of the world's greatest tragedies. He lives with that legacy by trying to stop others from doing the same. Then he starts to notice differences in how he feels, what he notices, how quickly he can process information. Something has altered his genes, the one thing he has been trying to prevent his whole life. Now he needs to find out how this happened, who is behind it, and how he can stop it from becoming another worldwide disaster.

Wow. This twisty thriller will keep you on the edge of your seat. I loved Recursion by Blake Crouch and Upgrade gives me all the same things I loved about Recursion. This book makes you think hard about the world we live in, what's possible in the near future, and what you can do to stop it. If you liked Recursion, preorder this one now. Crouch has given me another book that I will be thinking about for many years to come.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group for this ARC.

Another fast paced, hard to put down, thrilling story from Blake Crouch. In the same vein as Dark Matter and Reclusion, you will be immediately sucked into a masterfully created near-future world.

Upgrade battles some of life’s oldest questions like what would you risk for the greater good? Would you risk a life to save many or, in this case, would you risk many lives to save all of humanity?

In many ways, this book is like catching a glimpse into our very bleak future. But much more entertaining than that.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and, though it resembles his previous work, Upgrade had a unique and creative story line full of it’s own surprising twists. I highly recommend!

Very enjoyable sci-fi thriller about a man trying to save humanity. Made almost super human after a genome attack, Logan Ramsey battles against secret government agencies, his own bosses and eventually his own family to save humans from a dangerous plan to edit the genes of entire world population. This novel is fast paced, thrilling and thought provoking. 5 stars!

Love all books by this author! I'm a science major and I love reading thrillers so anything that Blake Crouch puts out I'll grab without hesitation. This is no different.

With that being said, you don't have to be a science major to follow his books. I know nothing about biology but he explains his science along with the storyline so you never feel like you're missing something.

I think he expertly delivers this book with a good scifi/thriller mystery along with a good relationship storyline, plus a little superhero complex (no, not batman/ironman). Upgrade refers to upgrading your genetics to be the best of humanity - whether or not you want to - which loops into the whole storyline.

I love reading anything from Blake Crouch so my view my be skewed but I can't wait for his next story!

“We don’t have an intelligence problem. We have a compassion problem. That, more than any other single factor, is what’s driving us toward extinction.”
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Scientist Miriam Ramsey’s miscalculated experiment caused a mass starvation event, killing millions of people. Years later, out of guilt, Logan— her son— works for the Genetic Protection Agency… hunting down people who are trying to use the science created by his mother. During a raid, Logan is injured during an explosion. At first he seems to be recovering normally, but then he notices his mind is sharper. His genome has been hacked and there is a reason he was the target for this Upgrade.
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I’m not usually a Sci Fi reader… but I’ve heard such great things about Bake Crouch’s work, when I saw Upgrade on Netgalley I jumped at the chance to read it! 🏃‍♀️
Ugghhh welll I should have passed 🫣 this book was not my jam 🍇There were brief parts that caught my attention… but most of the time I just felt like I was reading a science journal 😴
I was a bio major my first year of college and switched FOR A REASON. I started skimming the genetic blah blah blah hoping for something exciting to happen 🫠
I’m sure this book is someone’s cup of tea 🍵 it’s just not mine 🤷🏼‍♀️
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I received a digital copy of this book as an ARC in exchange for my honest opinion. Thank you NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group Ballantine and of course author Blake Crouch. All opinions expressed are my own.

I loved Dark Matter so I was so happy to get a @netgalley ARC of Upgrade by Blake Crouch.

I will admit that I liked Dark Matter better than Upgrade, but I still found this book to be so good.

It’s very science & DNA heavy, but Blake Crouch does an amazing job of explaining the science to the reader. Not once did I feel like I didn’t understand what was going on.

Crouch does a great job of keeping the reader engaged because his writing is very realistic. I kept thinking this is such a crazy topic, can you imagine if there was a way to alter your DNA…make you stronger, smarter, faster??

A thoughtful sf thriller. It's like a science-based thriller version of Flowers for Algernon. I also think it would be a great companion piece to Joe Haldemann's Forever Peace because it explores the question of what would it take to get humanity to stop destroying everything.

Upgrade takes place in a future where tinkering with genetics has been outlawed after a devastating good-deed-gone-wrong resulted in worldwide famine. MC Logan feels guilty and responsible because he helped his brilliant biologist mom release the virus she had engineered, which caused the the crop blight. Logan has served his prison time, now has a lovely wife and daughter, and works for the Gene Protection Agency. He's doing a pretty routine assignment, when he is exposed to something strange. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that Logan begins to think he has been given an "upgrade."

All the genetic engineering that Crouch writes about is pretty interesting. In real life, no one actually wants the MTHFR gene that he writes so glowingly about. And the idea of losing your sensory gating sounds like a TOTAL NIGHTMARE to me. But everything is explained very convincingly. The really interesting idea Crouch delves into is whether being more intelligent would lead people to make better and more rational decisions. Or would it just make people think they are better than everyone else, ignore their own trauma, decide that whatever they are already obsessed with is actually the most important issue in the world, and that they should make decisions for everyone else? And is that kind of intelligence really the most important piece of being a good human? I think, wouldn't it be great if cis men in the "science fiction community" and everywhere started pondering this question A LOT? So that is one great thing about this book.

Reading along, I felt that upgraded Logan's ability to set his emotions aside (in a metaphorical Faraday cage) was a mistake. And that greater rational ability would not help without greater compassion and a sense of interdependence and belonging. In the bang-up ending, <SPOILER> it turned out that Blake Crouch had been leading me along by the nose the whole time and this was exactly what he was saying. </spoiler>

This is the third novel by Crouch I have read and I haven't been disappointed by any of them. I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for this honest review.

Upgrade is a story of the near future, a world still very recognizable as our own. Genetic engineering technology has developed with enormous potential to improve the current state of the world, but also with the potential for a terrible cascade of repercussions. Logan Ramsey balances on this razor’s edge as he inadvertently becomes responsible for the future course of humanity. Yet another action packed sci-fi thriller from Blake Crouch.

The scientific explanations bog the story down at times, and some of the details feel too fantastical even for a “upgraded” super human, but any fan of Blake Crouch won’t be disappointed.

Thank you NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review Upgrade.

I liked DARK MATTER and I loved RECURSION, and I would probably rank UPGRADE between those two. Like Crouch's other works, this novel manages to be both fast-paced and quite science-y. It's not a book you can autopilot through, and I struggled at times t get through some of the more technical information and language. The science aspects actually reminded me of PROJECT HAIL MARY, though tonally, they couldn't be more different.

It's a surprisingly thoughtful and - at times - philosophical take on sci-fi, and at times actually reminded me of Ted Chiang (THE THREE-BODY PROBLEM),

Even though Dark Matter and Recursion both sit in my TBR pile, this is the first Blake Crouch novel I’ve read, so I really didn’t know what to expect going in. But it is really good! Lots of action, moving forward in sprints and gallops, with some very unexpected twists. It is also surprisingly thoughtful, even philosophical, for an action novel full of guns and gritty determination. I look forward to reading more of Blake Crouch’s work.

Upgrade was such a wild and fun ride. This book is my new favorite by Blake Crouch. It also reminded me a lot of a short story in Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang where two humans with super-human knowledge and abilities go head-to-head. Upgrade was fast-paced and it had the Michael Crichton feel I’ve come to expect from Blake Crouch. Loved it so much!

In my continued to attempts to read more science fiction, I opted to read another Blake Crouch novel despite some mixed feelings about "Recursion"... and I'm happy that I gave "Upgrade" a chance!

Crouch's latest novel imagines a future world that has pushed the frontier of genetic modification to the point of creation of the Gene Protection Agency (GPA) - the agency where our protagonist, Logan Ramsey, works. When Logan embarks on a raid to reveal a suspected illegal genetics facility, he's caught in an accident that exposes his body to an unknown virus. After recovering and coming to the conclusion that no major harm has been done to him, Logan tries to continue on with life as normal, until he realizes that he's changing. His physical reflexes and strength, his intelligence and awareness, his recovery and repair - they're all improving to superhuman levels, so Logan attempts to figure out what's happened to him. We get to see his childhood, growing up as the son of renowned and disgraced geneticist Miriam Ramsey, and the repercussions of her findings and decisions on her family today.

I found "Upgrade" to be a much more readable novel, blending genres of science fiction, action, and thriller incredibly well. There's a fair amount of genetic terminology that gets utilized throughout, but Crouch does a great job of introducing these concepts at large so they're digestible for the average reader. The writing is consistent throughout, and I appreciated the number of complex characters that are introduced in the storyline. In this novel especially, I think Crouch is able to pull out some overarching themes and questions that we face in different applications - the battle between scientific advancement against quality of life, the importance of qualities that make us weak, but human - that are subtlety layered in.

Any time I read a Blake Crouch book, I know that I will expect my head to spin and that I will be high in adrenaline with all the action that will be packed into the book -this was no exception, it checked off all the boxes.

For those who haven't read his work before, he delves deep into scienc-y terms and that is both exciting to read and can be overwhelming but he makes it work by relating it back to direct human impact.

This was based on altering human genomes - and while that sounds like something from the future....he made it sound scarily real and something that could potentially happen today...and what would that look like?
I loved the doomsday feel coupled with the concept of being "upgraded" - it thrilled me.
It was written well and pretty much could be flipped over into a move in a nano-second. Definitely recommend if you loved his previous work.

In a not-too-distant future gene editing goes off the tracks and precipitates a global disaster. Typical societal overreaction leads to the banning and criminalizing any kind of genetic research. Logan Ramsay is the son of the scientist who engineered the global debacle. He becomes an agent of the Gene Protection Agency who use draconian policing to deter any genetic research.

Logan has his personal demons to fight as he toes the line with his agency. A bust goes awry, and Logan receives the brunt of the problem.

This book does take a hard look at our future and our willingness to put our collective heads in the sand when any uncomfortable societal ills rear their heads.

The author does a masterful job showing that unbridled intellect with no corresponding emotional safeguards can have devastating consequences.

I recommend the book.