Rachel and Borne’s relationship is the heart of this book. And yet Rachel tries to teach him to be human, to varying degrees of success. She finds Borne, a small blob of biotech, and raises him like her child, teaches him, loves him. I think one of the other themes is humanity, represented here by Rachel. What exactly has caused the disaster that has led to the destruction of civilization and the decline of humanity isn’t super clear–but it feels as if it wasn’t any one thing but rather a culmination of bad decisions made over time that have led to this inevitable conclusion. Here’s an imagined future where the seas have risen and the natural world has been invaded by bio-engineered creatures. And that’s probably true here too, but one thing that rings through very clear in this story is the author’s feelings about the natural world and the environment. A lot of times when I read more literary types of books like this one, I feel like a lot of the themes go right over my head. But it’s a book that made me think and for that, I love it. It’s taken me a while to figure out how to review this book because it’s just so very strange and wonderful and it has a lot to say but I’m not entirely sure all the time of what exactly that is. Yet when she takes Borne to her subterranean sanctuary, the Balcony Cliffs, Rachel convinces her lover, Wick, not to render Borne down to raw genetic material for the drugs he sells-she cannot break that bond. She feels an attachment she resents attachments are traps, and in this world any weakness can kill you. The Company, although severely damaged, is rumoured to still make creatures and send them to distant places that have not yet suffered Collapse.īorne somehow reminds Rachel of the island nation of her birth, now long lost to rising seas. Driven insane by his torture at the Company, Mord terrorizes the city even as he provides sustenance for scavengers like Rachel.Īt first, Borne looks like nothing at all-just a green lump that might be a Company discard. Mord once prowled the corridors of the biotech organization known as the Company, which lies at the outskirts of the city, until he was experimented on, grew large, learned to fly and broke free. In a ruined, nameless city of the future, a woman named Rachel, who makes her living as a scavenger, finds a creature she names “Borne” entangled in the fur of Mord, a gigantic, despotic bear.

Borne jeff