CLONE CRISIS by Melissa Faye

4.5 out of 5 stars

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How I discovered this book: it was submitted to Rosie's Book Review Team, of which I am a member.

Genre: Dystopian, Futuristic, SciFi 

I really enjoyed this book.  I'm not its target audience, which is (it says) YA/NA, but it's the sort of intelligent YA that's not terribly 'teen'.  It's set in the US about 300 years in the future, when a 100 year long fertility crisis means that the human race continues by way of cloning.  Obviously this means no families; citizens live in communities, where they are divided into Gold, Silver, Bronze and Grey categories, according to intelligence and capability tests taken at a young age, and assigned a job most suited to them ~ allegedly.

It's all about the community.  Most follow the culture and rules laid down by the authorities without question, but the main character, a 'Gold' intern doctor called Yami, has started to think that all is not as it seems.  Then the impossible happens: someone gets pregnant.

I liked Yami very much; she's antisocial, doesn't require many friends, and says what she thinks because she doesn't care too much what others think of her.  The blinkered believers and followers of rules get on her nerves.  Some of her friends are super-irritating in their inability to see what was really going on, but such is the way of things in these dystopian worlds.  The writing flows well, all the characters are clearly defined, and the story is not predictable.  The science is convincing, too, when it needed to be; I never thought, uh-oh, she doesn't know enough about this stuff.  It's clear, for instance, that computer hacking/concealing of data is not her area of expertise, but it's written in such a way that the reader has all the information he/she needs. 

There were a couple of areas that I felt could have been dealt with more fully; for instance, Yami and her friends have to leave the community to travel across country to others, over land they have never seen before, but there was nothing about what the country actually looks like, 300 years on.  Where are all the old cities and towns?  I'd have thought the characters would have been gazing about in wonder, and I was looking forward to knowing what America was like outside these small, artificial settlements, but there was nothing.  Or perhaps Ms Faye didn't consider that necessary for a YA/NA novel ~ as I said, I'm not exactly its target market.

Yes, I'd recommend it for any lovers of light, dystopian/futuristic scifi.  The ending is excellent, and made me want to read more, which I definitely will do.