I’m starting out with a bang this year by doing my first review in January! I’m all over the place with CBR’s. Last year I did 1 review for 2 books and I did it on NEW YEAR’S EVE! Yes, the day reviews were due and CBR 17 was closing. To cut myself some slack 2025 was a wee bit of a dumpster fire for my family. We had divorce, cancer, family moving in, too many cats, un-divorce… (everyone is fine now!)
The year before I had hit my Cannonball in May after writing my first review in April. This year I will be the responsible reader and reviewer that I know I am deep down inside.
I had high hopes for this book. First of all – the cover is beautiful. I read the kindle version, but I still got the enjoyment of judging a book by its cover when I selected it! The premise was also SUPER interesting. As a scientist and single woman joyfully without children, the idea of human extinction related to childbirth fully intrigued me.
This story is about twin sisters (Maggie and Charlie) who find out when they’re young that humanity is basically scheduled to end in four generations if scientists can’t break “The Limit”. Each person is evaluated (once the limit is discovered) to figure out their number, which is basically how many generations you have left. So the twins are 5* (I think), which means they can have kids, then their descendants can have 4 more generations. The government has assemblies in school, their parents have intense discussions with them, and families dissolve in their youth, all related to The Limit. The twins decide to enroll as birth counselors in a program called Mendella. Charlie wants to do the sciency part, and her sister Maggie wants to do the counseling part. The Mendella is basically a program (here’s where I get murky on the whole idea) where they try to encourage people to either: have multiple children, or delay having children as long as possible. Then the program gives money to the people. There’s also some IVF stuff that happens that I didn’t fully follow. I kept going back to the beginning to see if there was some exposition I missed. Sadly, I was left afloat.
The beginning of this book was engaging and felt like it was going somewhere. Then when the girls actually start doing the work, I frequently got lost in the sauce. There are also some heinous experiments that go on with different people and a death that I truly thought was going to be a fake out. In the end, this book didn’t really do what it set out to. I was confused and definitely let down.
