The Museum of Second Chances
What happens when the future recaptures the past?
In a post-apocalyptic world the human race has evolved beyond us through genetic engineering – and we’ve been left behind to make amends for the damage inflicted on the earth.
The reversal of the extinction of long lost animals is key to our reparations and all of these are housed in the Museum of Evolution – along with another species of human that hasn’t existed for 30,000 years.
Elise belongs to the lowest order of humans, the Sapiens. She lives in an ostracised community of ecological houses, built to blend with an idyllic landscape. Deciding to widen her stagnating life in the manufacturing base, she takes a chance opportunity to become a Companion to a previously extinct species of human.
But Elise has secrets of her own that threaten to be exposed now that she is away from the safety of her home. And while living in the museum, Elise realises that little separates her from the other exhibits…
Purchase Link – http://mybook.to/TMOSC
Review
Thanks to Rachel for organising this tour and to the author for a copy of the book.
200 years from now the human population has contracted after a pandemic and the starvation that went with infrastructure destruction. The human population has been separated into small groups, living in towns that are meant to blend in with the landscape. They have also been genetically engineered. Or at least some of them have.
Sapiens have no genetic engineering and are responsible for ‘reparations’ for all the damage done by humans over the previous 80,000 years. They must work in production centres and finish school at 16, after being drilled in how they are responsible for the world being wrong. They are not allowed to leave the towns they are born in and live in constant fear of infection from the water supply.
Medius have a few engineered tweaks and are a middle class of sorts, with some access to education and mobility between towns. They look down on the ‘Saps’ as barely human.
Potiors have ten or more gene tweaks and have ‘super-human’ abilities and intelligence. They control life for everyone else.
Elise is a Sapiens, brought up in the Outer Circle of Thymine Base, the town in Zone 4 where she has lived all her life. She’s seventeen and bored of working in a broom factory. She gets a job working in the Museum of Evolution as Companion to Neanderthal Twenty-One. She has finally made it.
She gets to know Kit (or Neanderthal Twenty-One) and her colleagues, and finds out that almost everything she thought she knew before she entered the Museum is a lie.
I found this novel intriguing and very easy to read. I immediately started reading the second book in the series as soon as I finished this one. Elise and her family are incredibly normal, except for their fast reflexes, and she is content with life in Thymine. But as the story unfolds she realises that she’s just another exhibit in the zoo and that there is something very wrong with the world. Her friendships with Luca and Samuel, Kit and Seventeen, help deepen her understanding of the world.
I found the slow revelation of the lies Elise has been taught built tension as did the final escape. I also thought the premise – genetically engineering humans and re-engineering extinct animals – was interesting. It’s not exactly scientifically accurate, since so few genetic traits have a single genetic cause and many are mediated by environment, sometimes over several generations, but it’s a good ‘what-if’ idea to play with.
The characters are very individual, from Aiden, Elise’s paranoid father, to Harriet the pompous personnel officer who looks down on Elise and all Sapiens (metaphorically – she’s very short and makes up for her feelings of low self worth by being vile to everyone she considers beneath her). We’ve all met people like Harriet – a person with a superiority complex and low self-esteem who makes themself feel better by petty nastiness and demonstrations of their ‘power’. They usually work in HR or middle management. Actually, Harriet did almost edge into caricature on occasion but not quite. The other characters, and events in general, are filtered through Elise’s beliefs and experiences so we never see the full picture.
The plot was good, well-thought out and fun to read. Over all, a good first novel and I shall look forward to reading the rest of the series.
Author Bio –
AE Warren lives in the UK. A not-so-covert nerd with mildly obsessive tendencies, she has happily wiled away an inordinate amount of time reading and watching sci-fi/ fantasy and gaming. She is interested in the ‘what ifs’.
The Museum of Second Chances is her first novel and she is currently writing the third book in the ‘Tomorrow’s Ancestors’ series.
Social Media Links –
Instagram – @amauthoring
Facebook – @amauthoring
Twitter – @amauthoring
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