Expiration Day

February 3, 2014
It’s 2049, and with most of humanity rendered mysteriously infertile, immaculately realistic robotic children called teknoids serve as outlets for adults’ stymied parental urges. Tania Deeley grows up believing she’s one of the few human children left. First-time novelist Powell gets the obvious twist—that Tania herself is a teknoid—out of the way early, focusing instead on the dilemmas that result. If Tania isn’t a real person, why can she perform music, grieve the dead, and even fall in love? And what happens to Tania when her parents’ 18-year lease on her ends? This story covers an unusually long span of time and comes out the stronger for it. The chatty 11-year-old who begins this diary-style novel is very different from the determined 17-year-old who ends it, but the transition is natural, and the essence of Tania’s voice stays true. Sometimes the exposition gets clunky, as in a weighty testimony about teknoid history and neurobiology toward the end of the book, but Tania’s creativity, pathos, and personality prove that she’s just as much a person as any flesh-and-blood human. Ages 13–up.

In a marvelously touching performance, narrator Gabrielle de Cuir embodies the fragility, determination, and curiosity of a 14-year-old English schoolgirl. Tania is struggling to find her way in the near future of 2049, a time when the world population has been decimated by infertility and hopeful parents have taken to adopting highly specialized androids, indiscernible from humans, as their children. The book deftly weaves the coming-of-age concerns of friendship and first love with the lofty themes--the limits of technology and what it truly is to be sentient. It's a rare event when one hears an audiobook that expands one's mind and breaks one's heart at the same time. De Cuir makes every last word of this first- person story come alive with an adolescent's hopes, doubts, and dreams. B.P. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award � AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine