Birthmarked Review

Birthmarked by Caragh O'Brien

My Rating: 4 stars

Synopsis

After climate change, on the north shore of Unlake Superior, a dystopian world is divided between those who live inside the wall, and those, like sixteen-year-old midwife Gaia Stone, who live outside. It’s Gaia’s job to “advance” a quota of infants from poverty into the walled Enclave, until the night one agonized mother objects, and Gaia’s parents are arrested.

Badly scarred since childhood, Gaia is a strong, resourceful loner who begins to question her society. As Gaia’s efforts to save her parents take her within the wall, she herself is arrested and imprisoned.

Fraught with difficult moral choices and rich with intricate layers of codes, Birthmarked explores a colorful, cruel, eerily familiar world where one girl can make all the difference, and a real hero makes her own moral code.

My Review

 I'm not always a fan of dystopian novels, but I really enjoyed this book. It hooked me from the beginning and had a lot of twists and turns that kept me turning page after page. I felt like a main theme of the book was that every life is of worth. I really appreciated that. I thought that the author did a great job at developing believable characters. Sometimes I got lost in the descriptions of the Enclave or the science behind the plot, but for me, the characters drove the story. I am anxiously waiting to read the sequel.