Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the advanced reading copy. This might be the most important book I have read this year. Not normally a fan of sci fi but this book drew me in. A futuristic world in which all men were killed by a mysterious disease. Scientific advancements allow for designer babies, an end to hunger and war but something is missing. Some "lonely hearts" want scientists to cure the disease and bring back men. A possible solution to the problem is stolen and a young women is tasked with helping to solve the crime. Athena will have to follow the clues and discover the answer to what happened and what she has to do with any of it. Very thought provoking. This book raises questions about all of humankind, both male and female. I cannot express what I loved about it without giving spoilers so I'll just say...READ THIS BOOK!

Basically an easy read, adults and teens could enjoy it. No long drawn out descriptions or confusing scientific language. Starkly written, it is the subject matter that makes this a stand out novel.

In the year 2099 when all men are long gone from the world from the Y-Fever we follow Athen as she navigates her way through a mystery about who stole the genome to bring men back.

This book was really cool to read. In between the chapters were Wikipedia definitions, children’s essays, profiles, advertisements, etc. It read like an episode of Black Mirror. Which I found really inventive.

I found my inner feminist rallying with the women of the future who were able to create a utopia without war, famine, and violence. On the other hand my heart broke every time I pictured a world without the men in my life. It was interesting that even in a utopian society where all the men were gone there was still conflict to be found between opposing views.

This book had so many creative ideas and still left me with so many unanswered questions. Small details that maybe seem insignificant, but I want to know desperately.

I will say that the editorial gave me chills. It made me angry. It made me sad. And it made me scared about the possibilities that are possible in our future.

Year 2099 and it has been 50 years since a virus has wiped out men on earth. Without them life has changed, no wars, no hunger, and no more homeless. Yet it has a controversial topic regarding bringing men back. The government has allowed the Lazarus Project which is working on a genome to bring men back. Then someone hacks in and sabotages the project. Athena Vosh gets brought in on the hunt of who is responsible for this. Uncovering the truth can lead to deadly consequences. When Athena discovers the truth she will have to make a choice that could impact everyones lives.

It is an interesting concept and the ending will have you thinking. A dystopian tale of a world without men and has its darks moments at times. It is YA Science Fiction with a bit of mystery mixed it. Not a bad read but there were parts I wish were builded up more.

A novel that takes us way into the future but forces the reader to think of our current position of life. How can one's behavior mixed with science, and genetics impact tomorrow? Thoroughly enjoyed this read in how the author Adam Noomstrom paints a complex picture of the future of "man" spirituality and morality. Also pay attention to some of the names of the main characters like Eve, Grace and Athena. All names that have meaning in themselves which adds to their complex personalities.

The book leaves with a cliffhanger, but the author also challenges the reader to decide what the outcome should be. Should men be brought back into humanity? Depending on the answer there are pro's and con's to that decision.

I liked this story initially, but I had several problems with it: some of the writing was a bit off, the story moved slowly, the main character seemed really quite stupid at times, and the premise of a stolen genome was really thin. Even so I might have been willing to rate it positively, but the ending was such a let-down that I honestly can't bring myself to commend it was a worthy read.

The basic story is that of a future world which is highly technological and idyllic, and in which men are completely absent, having died out as a result of a plague which inexplicably seems to have afflicted only men. The story tells us that the plague attacked the Y chromosome in several different ways, which was why it was so successful, but it fails to address the fact that the Y chromosome is largely a degraded X chromosome, so it begs the question as to why this plague didn't affect any women? Why didn't it affect male animals? The chimpanzee genome is almost identical to the human genome, so did all the male chimps die out too? Again, it's never even mentioned, much less addressed. Closer to home, the question of what happened to transgendered people is completely ignored - like they don't exist or worse, don't matter. This was a bad no-no.

Equally bad was a complete failure to address how this had affected the world of human society and industry. While I don't doubt that there are women who would be thrilled were there no men around (and sometimes I don't blame them quite honestly!), I can't imagine that every woman on the planet would have been happy that no men were left. How did that affect life? How did they start to recover? Given that men are so pervasive in business and sports and so on, how did it affect those things? Women can of course fill any role that a man can, but that doesn't mean they come to that role with the same experience as the men who had been, prior to their disappearance, doing it on a daily basis, so what happened in the interim, until the slack was taken up? Did robots fill in?

On that score, this world, replete with AI, seems inexplicably devoid of robots and by extension (so to speak) of male sex dummies! Did every woman become lesbian? How? Why? Did the women immediately start trying to work out how to clone more women? How did that fare? Were there setbacks? Fights? Civil war between women? None of this is addressed. It's like the loss of the entire male half of the population was a complete non-event! While that's amusing to postulate, in practice, it needs addressing. The thrust of the story is not about that, so I didn't expect reams of backstory on the topic (that would have been boring), but to fail to address it at all, not even in passing, in casual remarks here and there perhaps, is inexcusable.

Anyway, after so much time without men, there is a movement and a scientific project that's been going on for five years, to recreate the male genome. It's not explained how come there isn't anywhere a computer file, hard drive, set of disks, or textbooks or anything remaining as to the male genome.

Given that the male genome is almost identical to the female one, it isn't explained why it's taking so long - except for some vague and farcical hand-waving about the virulence of the virus, and the fact that the genome must be robust enough to counter it, but this made little sense. If it attacked only human males and all human males died out, then the virus had to either die out along with them, and so would not be a problem, or it had to find a reservoir in which to survive and in time, to evolve. If it evolved, it would be a huge and ongoing problem, threatening even the female population! None of this is addressed, not even in passing.

One of the biggest problems in these dystopia type of stories is the failure to address the rest of the world. Did all humans die out or was it just in the US? If so, there are already males in other countries! Did even the males on the International Space Station die out? Those on remote islands? Even if they did, other countries are probably working on bringing men back and at the very least, they certainly have the genetic information available, but this story behaves as though the US is the only country on the planet!

Unfortunately, that's the blinkered tack that far too many of these futuristic stories take, and it makes the story seem really dumb. None of that was adequately addressed. I don't imagine for a minute that if all men disappeared, suddenly every country would get along and throw away its nationality to join together and make a world alliance. People aren't like that, not even women. If the US Republican women can't bring themselves to join the US Democrat women in issuing a condemnation of the president's repeated misconduct (at best) towards women, how can you expect women from entirely disparate nations to ever agree on anything like a world government?

Even without all of those issues though, the big problem with this novel was that the main character repeatedly came off as being less than sharp. She kept having dreams in which an urgent message was imparted to her. Now admittedly in keeping with this kind of a story, the message was vague to the point of uselessness - and frustratingly and irritatingly so - but this doesn't change the fact that something urgent was going on, and yet Athena never once reacted to this like it was an issue. She just let it wash over her like nothing was wrong, no problem existed, she was not somehow chosen to resolve a supposedly serious issue, and so on. This made her look stupid to me, like some sort of lackadaisical country bumpkin who just didn't get it.

Like I said, it didn't help that the dream warnings she kept getting were annoyingly vague. It's so reminiscent of other stories or movies/TV shows I've encountered where the psychic gets warnings of an impending murder or a disaster, yet they never get detail enough to stop it. Instead of "Stephen Davidson is going to be murdered by David Stephenson on the corner of Fifth and Main in Big City with a knife at two in the morning on Tuesday the eighteenth," all they get are the most worthless and vaguest of details and it's really irritating.

It would have been far more interesting had the warnings been specific, but something else had prevented the protagonist from getting the problem solved, but this was not such a novel. This one was of that same, vague, irritating nature, and given where the warnings were coming from, they ought to have been much better, but the worst part about this was again Athena's complete lack of motivation. She was so passive throughout, that she herself was annoying.

The reason that the premise was thin with regard to the genome being completely gone was several-fold. First is the ambient ignorance that seems so pervasive when it comes to how information is stored in a computer. There seems to be this crazy notion that if the information is copied, it's not really copied, but instead it's actually removed from the original and shifted entirely to another location. This isn't how copying works.

The problem here seemed not that someone had copied the genome, but that the genome was gone: i.e. erased. It is possible to delete the information, but deleting normally doesn't actually delete it, it simply marks the location as vacant - so it can be used for other storage, but unless the storage has been significantly overwritten since the deletion (which is how it's truly deleted), it's quite possible to recover it.

Having said that and in view of some information that became revealed later in the story, it's possible the thief did erase the information, and in such a way that it was impossible to recover it, but never once was this mentioned, nor was it explained how this thief got by the AI watchdogs. Instead, there was just this bland and blind assumption that it was gone and there were no backups, which was profoundly stupid. Of course there are backups, and unless the people operating the system are complete morons, the back-up is off site and in a secure location, preferably on a different medium that does not permit electronic outside access. So for example if you have some songs on your computer and also stored on disks, then if they're accidentally erased from the computer, you can restore them from the disks.

Now if even one person had simply asked, "It was deleted? Can't we recover it from off-site backup?" and was given a definitive "No!" (because the backup had been tampered with, for example), then the story would have made a lot more sense, but no one, not even the police captain in charge of the inquiry, ever asks this. It was a glaring hole through the whole story, but nowhere near as glaring as the fact that this whole thing was a charade, but I can't go into that without revealing a plot point (not that the plot ever pursued that point - which accounts for my dissatisfaction with the ending, an ending which just sort of fizzled out).

There were some oddities in the text here and there, such as when Athena who has of course never met a man, views them fantasy-like as having rough, calloused hands and strong arms. Whence this idea of what men were like? Maybe she read it somewhere? The thing is that it doesn't say that in the text, so it leaves this question hanging as to how she knows - or more accurately, why she has this bizarre idea of what a man is like. It's never addressed, nor is it addressed why Athena, evidently a lifelong lesbian, is suddenly fantasizing, completely out of the blue, about strong men.

At another point in the text I read the word "brusk" - except that it's not a word. The actual word is 'brusque', which comes to us from the French, via the Italian, via the Latin (as always it seems!) from a word meaning a brush, so it's really apt, but you'd never know that from 'brusk' which sounds like some sort of snack food for a teething toddler. It would seem that the misspelling used here is disturbingly becoming acceptable. The problem with such linguistic languor is that we lose the root of the word, and our language becomes poorer for it.

At another point I read, "The sky had turned from dark black to dark blue" but isn't dark black just...black? Another kind of oddity arrived when I read, "At the bottom if the box lay a small, pink, sapphire object." The problem with this is that sapphire isn't pink. Sapphire is a precious way of saying of aluminum oxide and it can come in orange, purple, and yellow as well as the more commonplace blue, but if it's red, then it's not a sapphire, it's a ruby! So whence the pink sapphire? No idea. By 'sapphire-like' was the author talking about the shape of it? But 'sapphire' isn't a shape, so I have no idea what was meant there.

One more thing I found confusing was when Athena, looking out of her apartment window one morning, spies a river of delivery drones so thick it obscures the pedestrians below it on the street. The thing is that in this world, everyone apparently has 3D printers in their home to make things, such as clothes, and even breakfast, so why is there this massive need for delivery drones? What are they delivering - masses of printing 'ink'? This seems to have been one more case where this world hasn't quite been thought through, and it happened way too many times. That and the thin plot and lackluster main character really disappointed me, and I therefore cannot commend this story.

Interesting concept for a novel but so many plot holes and missteps in character development. Couldn't figure out if the theme was feminism or male supremacy.

I think I liked the formatting of this book more than anything else, which is weird. There were little snippets of newspaper articles, and grade school entries from the different characters that gave us glimpses of what the characters were like in between chapters. It broke the book up into different sections and I really enjoyed that. There was just something *off* about this book that I can't quite put my finger on. You'd think that it would be a feminist anthem, considering that all the men have been killed off by some Y-fever, and the future that these women are living in is a utopia in which crime is virtually non-existent, people are gainfully employed with medical care and receiving what amounts to a universal income. Athena, the protagonist gets sucked into helping the "police" find a stolen genome, which could help bring men back, if they can figure out how to cure what caused the Y-fever. Ultimately, without giving away any spoilers, there's this underlying current, that some women (coined lonely hearts) that aren't happy with their lot in life because men are missing from the world, all want men back for the same reasons, and that men are such simplistic creatures that they can't be separated from that which caused the Y fever to kill them to begin with. The premise of it just left a sour taste, there are conflicting lines of logic there that don't make sense to me. The science fiction of it, and the characters were well written and I can't fault that it will definitely challenge your opinions. It made me feel all kinds of different ways when I was reading it.

It took me a while to get into this, but it was a quick read once I did. I did have to keep reminding myself that it was very far in the future for some reason, despite the advanced technology, while also reminding myself that men hadn't been exterminated that far into the past. I wish more on the fever would have been given as a setup for the story and then a jump into the problem. Also, the "bad guy" was a bit predictable, but I did keep reading to see how the story unfolded.

Athena Vosh is one of the first generation who has grown up in a female only world. Climate change affected most of the Earth’s land mass in the early 21st century, and during the turbulent upheaval related to the loss of liveable land a mysterious illness known as Y-Fever wipes out all men. Not all of the women are happy without men though, and when a controversial endeavor known as Project Lazarus loses the masculine genome Athena may hold the key to masculinity’s return and the fate of her world.
Athena’s Choice by Adam Boostrom is a near future YA dystopian SF novel that explores the concept of “Would the world be better if women were in charge?” (Hint: the author seems to think so).Earth is peaceful, egalitarian, and nurturing, and every woman is guaranteed a happy, fulfilling life. How then is this world a dystopia? Large portions of the world are uninhabitable, and a world with only one gender doesn’t lose discrimination: it only no longer focuses on gender as a way to discount individuals.
I was immediately intrigued by the blurb about young Athena struggling to find her place in a female only world.. Unfortunately, the NetGalley version was only available as an Adobe Digital Editions book, so it took me several false starts to get into the narrative (I’m not a huge fan of having to read books on my computer rather than an e-reader). The action flowed smoothly, and I finished the narrative in a few weeks. However, I occasionally felt jerked out of the story by excessive description (painting a picture with words is good; beating the reader over the head with what something looks like because you’re using convoluted sentence structure and odd word choices is not)..Additionally, as I got later into the novel I was able to predict several plot points (raise your hand if you know Nomi would die). It’s much less interesting to continue a story when a lot of it is telegraphed heavily or fits a basic pattern.
If you don’t like open endings, don’t read Athena’s Choice. If you, like me, think that Athena may be a transgender man let me assure you that is not the twist in this story. Athena’s tale is engaging and enjoyable, but Boostrom prefers to focus on the inherent evil in men and the science of genetic manipulation than examining the social construction of gender. Overall, it’s an interesting story, but I was left wanting a deeper dive into an intense topic..
3.5 Visions of Buffalo out of 5

I did not entirely enjoy this book, although it was entertaining and has received good ratings. For me, it was too close to what is happening in the world today, society being male dominated and too much emphasis on putting men down, or blaming men for all the troubles in the world (whether true or not!).
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

I will not be able to review this book at this time. I cannot accept a epub format. Unfortunately this is not known as the only format before clicking the "read" button to request. 3 stars were givenn as a star rating ws required. I cannot say good or bad at this time. Lovely cover though!

This story was a pretty good read. A good story, well written. The characters were well developed and interesting.

I could not open the download of this book. It looks quite interesting and the cover is beautiful. I wish there was a Kindle download for this title.

Summary: Athena is just like every other girl living in the year 2099, a year that exists without men due to a outbreak that killed off all men including Trans men and even some woman. It's been years since men have existed in this world and many people think it's time to bring them back. There is one problem though, someone stole the genome that was going to help with this process. Athena's help is enlisted in finding out who stole this genome and through this process she comes to find the truth about things that lead her to a choice that can alter her future forever.

Thoughts: I love all books that deal with a virus, outbreak, disease, contagion, etc. so I expected to love this book just as much as the others. While I enjoyed this book I kind of wanted a little more about this virus in the beginning, like at least a scene to get what actually happened to these men.

The first half of the book takes a while to set everything up but what I was fascinated by was the advanced technology. I love how there's mock Wikipedia pages included for some of the more important pieces of technology in order to explain how things work. I thought it was cool because if I lived in that time I would be searching to see what these things are, and I liked how some AI systems are described throughout the book.

Something else that I enjoyed was the changes in the font that were included throughout the book. It made it so that the transitions were smooth and I was able to follow who was speaking or whose perspective you were reading. It also made it easy to see which portions came from Wikipedia, the government, or the newspaper and that added to the story.

While I really enjoyed this book and the commentary that it makes about the future and technology there was one part that I wasn't a fan of and that is the ending. I know that the author explains himself in the closing of the book but I still longed for a more conclusive ending. I do understand though that this book was more about what do we decide to do versus what Atena is going to do.

I recommend this to those of you who enjoy Science Fiction or books that are about technology and the consequences that it can have on our lives.

Athena has grown up in a world of women. Men all died off many generations ago. She has recently experienced some strange dreams and is called upon to help investigate a theft. This is an amazing, creative story and not completely impossible to see something like this happening in the not-to-distant future. The writing style is unique as well and I really enjoyed the change of pace! Loved it!

The year is 2099 and there are no men left on earth after they were wiped out 50 years ago by a virus. Scientific advancements have meant that there is now an option to bring them back, but someone seems to be sabotaging these efforts. Why is someone so determined to keep men from the world, and where does our seemingly innocent heroine, Athena Vosh, whose dreams are haunted by a strange library and a red book, fit into the puzzle?
A hugely entertaining slice of YA sc-fi, that sees Athena's normal teenage life shattered when she gets brought in for questioning about a series of sabotage attempts. While it soon becomes apparent that she had absolutely nothing to do with them, why did all the indicators lead to her, and what is the meaning of her dreams? As Athena's story arc unfolds, the reader is taken on a roller coaster ride through gender politics with a generous side helping of gender purity / gender cleansing.
Athena makes for a great protagonist, although not one you'd want to get too close to as that seems to go hand-in-hand with a dramatically shortened life expectancy in this novel! That's it for me for anything resembling a spoiler alert - read the book if you're interested in well-written thought-provoking dystopian fiction. Recommended.

A dystopian YA drama that is surprisingly about a future without men. It's not from a feminist standpoint though, but from a thought provoking aspect that men in their own way take themselves out via a terrorist virus that attacks the Y-chromosome. In their arrogance, they didn't realize it was self-replicating and soon there was no way to combat it, thus the demise of man (literally). Woman are left to rule and peace reigns, the Earth heals; humanity is better off or so it seems for about 50 years, but the heart knows when something is missing intrinsically.
It's a story of a world on the verge of self-discoverying what humanity really is and the ramifications of it those changes within it. It's definitely going to have you thinking beyond the story lines the entire book and seeing "what if" scenarios in your mind for days after you read it.

Athena’s choice
- Should we or shouldn’t we? …

In an utopian post-fever world, in which all men died of a deadly fever, and in which all women are carriers of this Y-fever virus, a woman named Athena, - named after the Greek gray-eyed Palles Athena, the goddess of wisdom, art and warfare, in de Roman world known as Minerva -, is trying to find the truth.
Athena’s world is an utopian world order only 5,000 years old, and where women rule. There is no sickness, no famine, no crime, no gun deaths, and no infant mortality. Life couldn't be better.
The Core is the world’s central computer system, that more or less provides these women with everything they could possibly wish for: disposable clothing, intelligent homes that change interior to individual standards, 3-D food processors, a germ free environment, calming scents, clothing, appointments, and food attuned to the bodily nutritional and bacterial need of each individual. The Core can also recall every conversation, thought, emotion, and visual thought from the beginning of times.
When a Lazarus genome is taken from a laboratory, - a genome that would make it possible to bring back males in society, is stolen from a lab -, Athena is called in to help retrieve the stolen genome.

Reminiscent of Brave New World and Logan’s run, this truly fascinating and highly original world building novel confronts the reader with a fundamental as well as an ethical question: can we create a truly happy world, and what would be the cost of living in one?
A fast paced and philosophical whodunnit/ utopian novel. Loved it from page one and hadn’t see the ending coming. Highly enjoyable read!!
***** 5 star

Great dystopian story about a world without men and where only females are reproduced and have been functioning and surviving for decades without men. Quite the opposite of reality where in many cultures men are considered to be the preferred sex and are relied on for survival. This was a riveting and thought provoking book and one heck of a page turner that was impossible to put down once I got deeper into Athena's world. It had me hooked from page 1. An engaging read that will leave you with lots to think about after you finish the book.

I wanted to love this book. The premise was amazing. But the writing was so, so bad. After the literally hundreds of times reading a sentence constructed like this: “waking through the room, she turned to speak.” Or “Running her hands through her hair, she looked into the mirror,” combined with the many times it was obvious the author used a random thesaurus rather than actually writing... I couldn’t enjoy it.