Jonathan Martin Dixit – Babyworld 2014

What a unique story.  This is a new author for me. I have to say that the 1st time I read the beginning I was distracted but when I finished the book I looked at the beginning again and had no issues.  The beginning seems a bit wild and disorganized but the main character is dealing with trauma and is in fact all those things.  Slowly we learn about this new world were science has made smart people. It is a bit of a detective story.  The main character is not personable and that was a risk the author took – we aren’t sympathetic until about 1/2 way through the story.  In the end I feel the story was a good one and very relevant.

Babyworld

by Dixit, Jonathan Martin, author.
Year/Format: 2014, Book , 332 pages ;
Subjects:
• Brain–Evolution–Fiction.
• Canada–Fiction.
• Dystopias–Fiction.
• Intelligence levels–Fiction.
• Lawyers–Fictlion.
• Murder–Investigation–Fiction.
• Science fiction, Canadian

Libraray Summary
BabyWorld is a crime mystery, soft science fiction novel that explores the psychological dysfunction occurring in families suffering from suppressed trauma. With its taboo-breaking subject matter, tempered by an almost children’s fairy tale-like style, it is written for a mature, literary audience. Toronto, September 2067. Ten percent of babies born are SMARTED; physically, emotionally and sexually they grow at normal rates, but cognitively they develop so fast that by six years old they graduate university and enter the heavily-taxed workforce, thus supporting Canada’s high standard of living-the highest in an otherwise polluted, politically volatile and over-populated world… Sinika Reichman is a nine-and-a-half-year-old lawyer having problems determining whether she is a child or an adult. When the case of a raped and murdered, non-smarted, five-year-old girl is outsourced to her firm, Sinika is put in charge of the prosecution. Partnered with twenty-five-year-old Nathan Towers, the office wunderkind, who is non-smarted and hates those who are, Sinika’s augmented abilities are put to the test as she skilfully dismisses one suspect after another. Her unregulated emotions become strained, however, as she encounters events she can’t handle and concepts she can’t process. Only by venturing out to Adult Island (old Centre Island), where children are not allowed, does she, aided by her recluse of a grandfather, Jonathan The Second, and her spirit-like great-grandfather, Jonathan The First, discover the true culprit, expose the core secrets about her neo-Dickensian society, and reveal the source of her own anxieties and her family’s dysfunction.