Birthmarked by Caragh M. O'Brien

Title: Birthmarked	Loved it	Graded
Author: Caragh M. O'Brien
Genre: Dystopian
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Elements: Birth switch
Series: Book 1 of a series

After climate change, on the north shore of Unlake Superior, a dystopian world is divided between those who live inside the wall, and those, like sixteen-year-old midwife Gaia Stone, who live outside. It’s Gaia’s job to “advance” a quota of infants from poverty into the walled Enclave, until the night one agonized mother objects, and Gaia’s parents disappear.

As Gaia’s efforts to save her parents take her within the wall, she faces the brutal injustice of the Enclave and discovers she alone holds the key to a secret code, a code of “birthmarked” babies and genetic merit.

Fraught with difficult moral choices and rich with intricate layers of codes, BIRTHMARKED explores a colorful, cruel, eerily familiar world where a criminal is defined by her genes, and one girl can make all the difference.

This is a wonderful, wonderful book. You need to read this. I can't really classify this as a dystopian novel because it's not as devastating as the genre usually is. It didn't feel me with hopelessness and grief, which is a good thing.

Dystopian is synonymous to devastation and hopelessness, in my eyes.

As for what it did do, it actually filled me with hope. Because babies! They're the embodiment of life, so anything involving babies must have a happy ending and a future for the people in that world. It's practically a no no for children and babies to be harmed in movies and books, especially babies, aka THE NEXT GENERATION.

Babies as a concept... it's interesting. Babies from a midwife's POV and not as the subject of a 'should I keep him/her oh no I'm a single mother' dilemma is ever better.

So. Birthmarked. In this future, babies are taken from their mother at birth and given to the people in the Enclave. It's a cruel thing to do really, but the mothers are so used to it that they give the baby up with concealed resignation and hatred and a smile on their faces as they 'serve the Enclave'. Pfft! And Gaia is not the unwitting, accidental heroine of this situation. She knows what she's doing, and she does it willingly because that's all she's known. And that's what she thinks is right.

And one day when she finds out that this seemingly perfect society has taken her parents? Whoa boy. You know she's excellent at her job; do you really think that she won't excel as defying the social norms to save her parents?

One thing I really appreciate about Birthmarked is the pace in which it's written. The story doesn't feel the need to join the high-speed chase that action and thriller books are usually in. It languishes at its own pace like the tortoise in a race, and finishes the whole shebang as the underdog of a winner, leaving the reader dazed and slowly realising that they've just been conned into reading what is just the beginning of a great journey. Great debut effort. I hope to read more books from O'Brien.