Published by Angry Robot on September 14, 2021
Genres: Science Fiction
Pages: 280
Format: eARC
Goodreads
It is your eighteenth birthday and one of your parents must die. You are the one who decides. Who do you pick?
In a dying world, the Offset ceremony has been introduced to counteract and discourage procreation. It is a rule that is simultaneously accepted, celebrated and abhorred. But in this world, survival demands sacrifice so for every birth, there must be a death.
Professor Jac Boltanski is leading Project Salix, a ground-breaking new mission to save the world by replanting radioactive Greenland with genetically-modified willow trees. But things aren’t working out and there are discrepancies in the data. Has someone intervened to sabotage her life’s work?
In the meantime, her daughter Miri, an anti-natalist, has run away from home. Days before their Offset ceremony where one of her mothers must be sentenced to death, she is brought back against her will following a run-in with the law. Which parent will Miri pick to die: the one she loves, or the one she hates who is working to save the world?
Thank you so much to Angry Robot for sending me a copy for review. And for including me on the tour!
This book was such an interesting mix of science fiction, dystopian, and climate fiction. It was a really bleak look into the drastic measures that *could* happen if we don’t save our planet. I think the actual things in the book (the Offset, the prisons, etc) were a bit exaggerated. I mean this in the sense that I don’t know if they would happen in reality, though don’t quote me on that. With the way current events are turning out…anyway. These things just helped to intensify the point that the authors were trying to make. For this reason I can’t say that I really “enjoyed” the book, but I think it was really well done.