PRECIOUS CHILDREN...to whom? why?...questions with more answers than I expected

PRECIOUS CHILDREN
MARY G. THOMPSON
Tachyon Publications (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$16.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4.8* of five

The Publisher Says: A wealthy family trying to cheat death is overmatched—by a stubborn teenager hiding in a body that looks just like their son. In this taut tale of genetics and entitlement, nature vs. nurture goes horrifically wrong.

Dina Blake’s fourteen-year-old son, Geoff, has just died for the second time. But everything will be okay. The Blake family’s wealth has bought them thousands of clones of each of their children. These children are farmed out to loving families, but with the caveat that the bodies are always available to the Blakes.

After Geoff dies, the Blakes upload their son’s memories into Nathan, who is an unwilling host, desperate to stay with the family who loved him.

Dina’s younger daughter, Di, is terrified because she knows something her parents don’t—the memory transfer doesn’t always go as planned. The Geoff who’s been living with them since his first death isn’t the person her mother thinks he is, and the families of the bodies the Blakes steal aren’t all innocent.

When Geoff returns to life in Nathan’s body, he has to contend with Nathan’s frustrating desire to live and his unexpected ability to fight for his life. For some children to live, others must die. Dina must decide how far she’ll go to protect her children, and Geoff must find out if, and who, he’s willing to kill.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A scathing, unnerving judgment rendered on the Cult of Mother, the repellent entitlement of wealthy people, the absence of ethical consideration in fertility treatment's grey areas...a very modern set of concerns not that often addressed in either fiction or public debate.

There's no guts'n'gore, nothing supernatural, none of the usual markers of horror that do not appeal to me; instead we're immersed in a world where the privileged are able to command the use of the underprivileged as breeding stock for their own children at the expense of children of their own. A take on the same story as Never Let Me Go, the horror of it is more pointed as it's brought to a conflict point the Ishiguro novel never sought...the struggle of one person to survive at the cost of explicit death for another character in the same body.

Dina's one relatable trait is the single, vague qualm she sort-of has about killing an actual person to have her piece-of-work son back. It's sad that it was permitted by Authority to come to this, the entire practice should never have been permitted at all, but at least her repulsive entitlement took a slight ding at this appalling practice at last.

I'm not sure this is the lesson I was meant to take away from the read but it's the one I internalized: There is no way in which privilege does not warp the privileged in very ugly ways. Dina's ambivalence about her willingness to kill someone else's child to get her own back is too little too late for my tolerance; and this is less speculative than it's pretending to be, more prediction of things to come.

Deeply unsettling meditation on the repugnant greed that dominates our world. A read that's stuck in the corners of my mind.