Birthmarked

By:  Caragh O'Brien

From Goodreads:  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 are arrested.



Badly scarred since childhood, Gaia is a strong, resourceful loner who begins to question her society. As Gaia’s efforts to save her parents take her within the wall, she herself is arrested and imprisoned.


Fraught with difficult moral choices and rich with intricate layers of codes, BIRTHMARKED explores a colorful, cruel, eerily familiar world where one girl can make all the difference, and a real hero makes her own moral code.
 
Overall, I really liked this book.  I thought the story was very unique.  It was horribly creepy and I pray nothing like this ever comes to pass, but it was a very interesting read.  I would have read it in one sitting if I could have. 
 
Gaia was a wonderful character.  She was a very strong female lead, but she was never mean or indifferent.  She was a very caring person.  She was a midwife at 16!  Once again, in YA fiction the parents are absent, but in this story its for much different reasons than usual, they're imprisoned for suspected treason. 
 
The writer had a very good way of creating the setting.  It was futuristic, but at the same time much simpler, which I would think would be hard to convey, but it was very vivid. 
 
The one negative about this book I have is all the genetics discussions.  They have a small population and there's a bit of inbreeding going on in the "elite" levels so they're having some genetic issues.  Some of the dialogue about genetics and DNA and breeding was starting to get a little too complex for me and I found myself getting confused and just skimming over those parts.
 
For the dystopian fan, this one is worth the read!