Best Science Fiction Books: Tankborn

Title: Tankborn
Author: Karen Sandler
Release: September 2011
Pages: 384
Genre: Science Fiction Mystery Romance

Kayla is a lot like many 15 year old girls. She is not exactly happy to be asked to accompany her baby brother to the river and would rather be with her friends. The difference is that Kayla is a GEN, a genetically engineered non-human, and unlike you or I, she was made not born. And so when her nurture mother Tala, the GEN woman who has been designed to care and nurture those developed in the tanks of Loka, asks Kayla to accompany her brother Jal to the river she complies and soon is wishing she hadn’t. Because while at the river the two find themselves at the mercy of a pair of humans, until they are rescued by a high-status human. And that is when the mystery begins for Kayla.

For on Loka there are several kinds of humans, based on status. If you are high-status you have plenty of rights and privileges and if you are GEN you are a slave. For GENs are designed with “skets”, which are abilities grafted from animals that make them particularly adept at certain types of work. For Kayla her sket is strength, and she has enough of it that she finds herself assigned to a powerful older family of high-status humans to care for the patriarch of the family, Zul.

While caring for him, and falling in love with his great-grandson, she begins to unravel a secret that Zul has been hiding for most of his life, and it involves her. What she learns and how this secret will change the life of every GEN is just a part of the secret, and one that can easily get her killed. For there is much more going on then appears, and she soon finds herself and her best friend Mishalla caught up in a secret that will rock the entire society they live in.

If you have ever given any thought to genetic engineering or the impact of social classes or even wanted to look at how a society imposes freedoms and the lack of it on a group of people, you will find Tankborn an intriguing book. Karen Sandler does such a great job with setting up the world that Kayla lives in; you just can’t help but be pulled into it. I found that within a few pages I could envision the planet and as the story of the society Kayla lived in was revealed, through the memories, philosophies and humor of the characters, I wanted to know more.

The girls are like so many other teenage girls, trying to be the grownups they are called to be and yet still wishing for childhood, though the childhood of a GEN is short and not always pleasant. But the township where they live, the move into the opulent world of the high-status humans and the glimpse into the dark side of their world gives us all a view into Kayla’s life.

It can be beautiful and it can be hard and dangerous, and it is this balance that makes Karen Sandler’s writing work so well. Tankborn is a book well worth checking out, and the kind of book that makes you sit and wonder about the characters and their world long after the last page is turned.