MISCREATION?

A teen’s battles with her mom reveal the dark soul of a genetic apartheid state in this fraught SF saga.

In the Genome Age circa 2077 the world runs on genetically modified organic technology, including “genmod” bamboo cars powered by biofuels, genmod moss carpets, and lights made of genmod phosphorescent organisms. Society is similarly fixated on genetics: There’s an elite group called IntelliGenes, engineered to be scientists or artists; a servant class of genetically unmodified Real Intelligence people; and an underworld of Miscreations, victims of genetic experiments gone wrong. Miscreations are telepathic but also often violently insane, which gets them relegated to slums on the margins of Genetico City. Fifteen-year-old Natalia Martyn faces a typical IntelliGene conundrum: Should she follow her heart and be a musical genius, or be a scientific genius as her mother, Elyssia, an icy, domineering geneticist at Genetico corporation, demands? Natalia’s vacillation triggers an intrusive investigation that gets Elyssia arrested and unearths secrets about her long-dead father and hidden Miscreation background. She weathers bullying at school—“Miscreation scum!”—aided by her younger twin sisters, their wisecracking (and safecracking) “mackawcatoo” bird, her gal-pal Leilani, and love-struck physics geek Simon, whom Natalia friend zones while gravitating toward fickle heartthrob Max and his genmod snakeskin leather jacket. This first installment of Yu’s Genetico Chronicles series feels like a high school version of Gattacaset in an eco-aware society that Greta Thunberg would love. The narrative is overreliant on manufactured crises that wouldn’t arise if characters just explained things to each other instead of keeping secrets. These devices lend heightened drama to ordinary teen travails: boy problems; the pressure to get into good schools; above all, furious mother-daughter fights. Yu’s limpid prose compensates for plot contrivances, ably conveying characters’ psyches with sensitivity and pathos. (“My mother must be very lonely if she prefers an unresponsive body to living, walking, talking people for company. A guilty twang plucks at me. Maybe I should have made more effort to be a daughter to her.”) Natalia is a tough, appealing hero as she fights prejudice and mysterious parental decrees.

A sometimes overwrought but richly imagined, entertaining YA dystopian fable.