Review: Birthmarked

Title: Birthmarked
Author: Caragh M. O'Brien
Publisher: Roaring Book Press
Pages: 361
Series: Birthmarked Trilogy #1
Rating: 4 stars
From the book jacket: 
In the future, in a world baked dry by the harsh sun, there are those who live inside the wall and those, like sixteen-year-old midwife Gaia Stone, who live outside. Gaia has always believed it is her duty, with her mother, to hand over a small quota of babies to the Enclave. But when Gaia's mother and father are arrested by the very people they so dutifully serve, Gaia is forced to question everything she has been taught to believe. Gaia's choice is now simple: enter the world of the Enclave to rescue her parents, or die trying.

-----------------

Birthmarked took me a while to get into it and at first I was afraid I wasn't going to like it. I really wanted to like it, because it came really highly recommended by some of my best friends, but it was just really slow getting started. Of course, that might have been because it took me ages to read any of it thanks to school, but it just felt painfully slow.

Fortunately, it got better. Much better. By the time I got to the end, I was completely ignoring everything around me so that I could keep turning pages. I wanted to know what happened. The characters were only part of it - I liked Gaia, but she was kind of slow sometimes; my favorite was definitely Leon - and the plot was well-crafted but it's hard to get a whole lot of variation in dystopian fiction; it's always someone fighting the system. I think what made this book for me was the world that Caragh O'Brien created.

Those who live inside the wall are privileged and have everything they need. Those who are born outside the wall, are born healthy, and are one of the midwife's first three babies of the month can be advanced - taken inside the wall, to be adopted and raised as an Enclave child. Those like Gaia, who are scarred or imperfect or simply unlucky, live outside the wall - a much harder, less privileged life. Gaia is training to be a midwife like her mother, and has learned all of her mother's traditions and practices. So when her parents get arrested, Gaia is asked to unravel the coded birth record that her mother left behind.

I really loved the set-up with the code (which I solved before Gaia did! At least partially...I was excited) and the DNA testing and everything. Birthmarked was not my favorite book ever or anything, but I definitely enjoyed it once I got into it. I was afraid there wasn't going to be a sequel, because the ending could go either way (I don't think that's too spoilery), but fortunately the author's website says that it's going to be a trilogy. I'll certainly be looking for book two once it comes out!

Links: 
Caragh M. O'Brien's website