The premise behind this one really intrigued me so I gave the audiobook a listen. The narrator was okay, but I wish I would have read this one instead. I had a lot of trouble getting in to this one and the flashbacks and timeline changes were really confusing and difficult to follow when listening. I remember parts of this book but if you asked me to tell you about it, I couldn’t. I would maybe give reading this one a try if I was in the mood in the future. This one gets 2.5 stars.

Thank you to NetGalley and Thinker Books for the audio version. Narrator did a great job giving each character their own voice. The book itself takes you for a ride into the future.

A great story but not what I expected. I found this to be different from what I’d imagined it to be but still just as thrilling and felt suspense that they experienced.

This book really took me by surprise!! The storyline was totally shocking and intensely compelling. The futuristic descriptions and inventions were mesmerizing and thought provoking on their own but to have a nice plot and captivating characters was a true treat!!! Athena Voss is a teenager in the year 2099 who’s really trying to find herself, she’s feeling like she hasn’t contributed and wants to be an artist but that is still just a dream. All the men have been gone from earth almost 50 years, killed off from a virus, and a project to bring them back has Athena right in the middle and she isn’t sure what is happening!! Athena has some hard questions to answer and some interesting data to process..will she bring them back???#NETGALLEY#ATHENA’SCHOICE

Athena's Choice is a novel that depicts a utopia or dystopia, depending upon your point of view (or possibly your gender). Set in the far future, the world has spent decades without men after a mysterious Y-Fever kills all males and a far smaller number of females. A young woman named Athena Vosh becomes drawn into a criminal investigation when the security around the Lazarus project, which is dedicated to reviving the males of the human race, is breached. Athena has been having odd dreams or visions, with of all things, what seems like a man, sending her information about the Lazarus Project and its lead scientist, Dr. Grace Antares. This is particularly odd because Athena is an artist, not a scientist, and she's a teenage girl.

Cutting back in forth in time, we see the evolution of the Y-Fever events, and the lives of Grace, Athen’s lover and friend Nomi, and a police investigator, Captain Valerie Bell, who enlists Athena's help after being directed to her by an AI called the Core. (The Core meets with Athena and maddeningly tells her that she has something to tell her but can't tell her unless Athena knows what to ask.) First, Valerie and Athena look into the breach of the Lazarus Project at the Helix research labs, and then, ultimately, Nomi helps Athena unlock a huge piece of the Lazarus and Y-Fever puzzle. And like I said, utopia? Dystopia? It's hard to say.

Some aspects of the book are rather fascinating such as the idea of Happiness Profiling, which plugs into people's brains and figures out what would soothe them or bring them happiness. The inventor of the method was horrified with the results. Let's just say that men and women are made happy by very different things in Athena's world. That said, I wish all the characters had had greater depth to them. The book is a slender 278 pages, and I think with a bit more length, we could have explored characters like Grace, Eve, and Valerie to build a richer story. There were also other aspects of the book which were too simplistic for me, however. Namely the fact that the book takes a very, very binary view of the world, and also doesn't take into account things like chromosomal variations. What if a man is XXY or XXXXY? What about XO women? What about trans individuals? (It also neglects any depth of discussion of sexual orientation, which most evidence points to as being biological and which affects brain development.) The book had a subterranean Minority Report feel to it, in which people are judged guilty before they've actually done anything. It's also interesting that this view of a feminist world is written by a man. Boostrom certainly gives us a view of a skewed feminist utopia. What is the cost of utopia? Is utopia ever real? A thought-provoking, if imperfect, novel.

Alex Ford does a fine job narrating the audiobook, adding dimensionality to the characters.

I received a Digital Review Copy of this novel from the publisher via Edelweiss, and on audiobook from in exchange for an honest review.

Athena’s Choice
Author: Adam Boostrom
Narrated by: Alex Ford

The story:
The story is told from Athena Vosh’s point of view and is set in 2099. 50 Years ago, an experimental virus wiped out the entire population on men from the planet. There is now a project in place to bring men back. This story debates the value of men, their purpose and mentality. The story is very thought provoking…. I enjoyed the tale however the ending was extremely disappointing..

The narration:
I thought the narration was clear and set at a good pace. Easy to listen to and understand.

3* from me.

First this isn't my type of story.
Very different about the future and a world without men .
Finished it but a took a while wasn't really a story more sci-fi.
Narration was okay but some of the voices didnt sound right.
Voluntarily reviewed.

Great read with an interesting premise. This book joins the best of speculative fiction with the page-turning suspense of a classic detective novel. The characters are credible and engaging.

This book had a very engaging storyline. The idea that a human-developed virus could wipe out the entire Y-chromosom population (yep, that's the entire male population) had me hooked immediately. It was also an interesting story direction to build a world without world hunger and war once all males had been eradicated (feminist idea to the extreme?), especially given it was written by a male Author.

Awesome world building, realistic AI design, and great moral conflict idea. It was a page turner with good story pacing, I really wanted to know what would happen next. The mystery element was also captivating, especially at the start. As the story unfolded, the plot twist got more and more predictable to me (because I read too many Mystery & Thrillers books), but it didn't really put me off the story overall.

Writing style-wise, the Author's choice to use a character's first name and title interchangeably within the same paragraph threw me a bit (e.g. "Captain Bell did X" and "Valerie then spoke" - took a few seconds for me to realise they were the same person), but it wasn't too annoying once I got used to it.

It read like an original Netflix movie - I could picture the scenes playing in my head clearly. I'd say it would make a good introduction to sci-fi for YA readers (even though the book wasn't labelled as YA), with the more scientific aspects relatively easy to understand.

Specific to the **audiobook** version, this was a great production. The voice actress did an awesome job, distinguishing between the more ethereal voice for the AI and Core, whinge-y tone for the 19-year-old Athena, and the more mature voice for Captain Bell. One scene where this was very obvious to me was the conversation between Athena and Core #3 - I had no problem at all following who spoke the line, as they had two very distinguished voices.

Once I realised that the ebook format would have a better visual on the news articles, memory scenes, and the likes, I decided to pick it up as well. The multimedia representation was definitely better, but the overall experience was probably equal to the audiobook (again, because of the awesome voice actress). The book was greatly produced, regardless of format.

This was a great futuristic story, starting with a pandemic that we could feel we could relate because of the 2020 pandemic!
Not only was it really interesting in the way the author made us feel about what our body or our children’s may be like in the future, but it also gave a vision of women empowerment. What would you do if no men were around ever again?!
It gave a great varied perspective on the role of everyone in our current society and Athena is a great ambassador for that throughout the book.

This was an excellent book read by a great narrator. The whole concept of a world without men is very interesting. Athena is a wonderfully developed character and the entire story was well thought out. I laughed, I was shocked, I was ready to shed a tear, the book was able to get me just the right way to provoke emotions. The audio book narrator seemed a little over the top at times, but it made the story more interesting in the end.

This books makes you think. Good but also disturbing idea: a world without men...
Liked some of the things that could be in the future, but hopefully not all of them will come true.
I liked Athena and Valerie, was a bit in doubt about Nomi but understood her in the end.
3.5 stars but rounded it up to 4


Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for providing me with a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

This is the best kind science fiction. The kind that makes you think while simultaneously entertaining you. The question at the center of the book is presented in a way that actually has me coming out against my own gender. While it’s difficult to review this book without giving too much away, I can still say the author makes a very convincing case against men. The audiobook is well produced and the narrator does a respectable job at portraying each of the characters. However, I felt that the acting could be a bit better.

The year is 2099 and the world is populated by women. Men have been wiped out by a virus created in a lab in order to rid the Earth of their "destructive" influences. In this current timeline, science has embarked on a project to bring men back but the genome has been stolen and the main protagonist, 17-year-old Athena, seems to be the only one who can find it.

While this book veers into the realm of young adult fiction, a style I generally steer clear of, the plot was strong enough to carry me through this one.

I really enjoyed learning about this future world despite the occasional clunkiness in how it was delivered. As an author I imagine it would be challenging to speak about complex, fictional technologies in a way that doesn't derail the plot. The way characters consume and prepare food is important to set the scene, of course, but in my opinion it shouldn't take center stage and compete with the plot itself. A prime example from Athena’s Choice is this passage:

"In the farthest corner of her room - taking up ample wall space that Athena believed could have been better used for more artwork - stood a massive, boxy piece of black furniture. Beside it, clumped into a pile, lay a mismatched heap of once-worn dresses, pants, blouses, and skirts. Frequently, Athena swore to herself that she would get around to organizing that pile of clothes. She needed to decide which discarded outfits to keep for wearing a second time and which to dump back into the boxy, black clothing-printer so that they might be rewoven into something new."

What an incredibly wordy way of saying this imagined future uses clothing printers that recycle garments!

I get the feeling author Adam Boostrom enjoyed creating this fictional future world, and I will admit it was the little details that made the story immersive. I just wish the writing was a little more streamlined and elegant in places.

While I’m being my honest, incredibly finicky self, I was not overly impressed with the character development. While we spent a lot of time with Athena I never really felt like I knew her intimately. I was also frustrated that her performative relationship with Nomi remained largely unexplored, and I was left wanting more resolution on that aspect.

The plot was a procedural who-dunnit with strong futuristic themes and the twists were pretty well executed. I am a little tired of the ‘seemingly normal but actually incredibly special protagonist’ trope at this point, but it was a means to an end in this book.

The philosophical discussions around differences between men and women was thought-provoking and I was impressed the concept came from a male author. I would have liked a more nuanced exploration involving other expressions of gender including trans and gender-queer voices, though.

Athena’s Choice was a fun and solid read for me. I found it worth the listen and would recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the Scythe books by Neal Shusterman and The Themis Files books by Sylvain Neuvel.

I received access to this audiobook at no cost, to provide the opportunity to give an independent review, through NetGalley. This review does not include any explicit spoilers, but hints at aspects of the storyline that are not immediately apparent in the book.

This book is best enjoyed as a whodunnit, with elements of speculation about the future of design with regard to things like wearables, implants, autonomous vehicles, architecture, artificial intelligence, and urban design. From that perspective, the book is an enjoyable diversion with interesting world- building elements.

Unfortunately, the major plotline of the book hinges on a premise that is based on a radically oversimplified and distorted understanding of evolutionary biology and psychology. The kernel of truth from legitimate science that is used as a jumping off point for the main premise for the novel is strained to the point where it is outlandish and, at times, offensive.

If a reader can either suspend disbelief or look past this rather glaring flaw, the story was generally interesting, and nevertheless offered some thought-provoking questions for consideration.

By and large, I still recommend it, but come in spite of, not because of, the science.

Interesting concept especially for now. The total killing off of men, so maybe I'm a little confused or I might have missed it but how do they impregnate the woman who wish for babies? and why are all the babies girls? can't you put some boys back into the mix. Humm.. I'm left with more question then I care to have.

Athena’s Choice
The story is performed by a single narrator who not only narrates but also performs all the characters.
I believe she did overplay some characters. Most notable was Captain Bell, performed with too many long suffering sighs and long suffering snarky dialogue delivery. And other characters seemed inauthentic. For instance a junior staff member came to the door to let Captain Bell know her next appointment was coming up and the narrator made it sound as if, instead of informing the Captain as a secretary might, she made it sound as if the secretary was admonishing her not to be late for the appointment. This may have been as the story was written however. I did not have the text to compare. But I doubt it.
Much of her character dialogue, however, is very engaging. Each character is easily differentiated- convincing and appropriate to their personality or role.
I enjoyed her cadence or modulation and the tone of her voice. It allowed me to get into the book, at times not even realizing I was in the book, the whole reason for the performance.
Overall I enjoyed the performance and would recommend this audiobook to my patrons.

I enjoyed this book. I wasn't thrilled with the ending (no spoilers), but it was a fun fast read. I thought the premise of a world without men was very interesting, and the technology imagined was also really cool. I would recommend this book. I received a copy of this book from netgalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

I was super intrigued by the premise portraying a future where all men have been eradicated by a pandemic, but I was also a bit wary, because the author himself is a man so I wasn't sure about the direction this book was going to take. Turns out I was worried for a reason and Athena's Choice turned out to be a huge disappointment.
To begin with, the story itself is just really poorly written. The world and the characters severely lacked depth and development, it felt more like an unfinished draft. But what bothered me way more was the sexism that was presented as "the natural order of things" or whatever nonsense. The idea that women are inherently more gentle, cooperative, empathetic etc., while men genetically are more aggressive, ambitious and self-serving may appear positive, but in fact it only adds to the existing gender stereotypes and is damaging gender equality. If you're still not convinced, just google "benevolent sexism".

A couple things that were a problem for me while listening to the audiobook was that I had to manually start every single chapter or it would skip one chapter ahead and the audiobook kept pausing if my phone was locked. These issues are probably a result of using the new NetGalley Shelf app and I hope they will be fixed in the future.

All in all, I was really hoping to like this book but sadly I didn't and I won't be reading anything more from this author.

Dystopia is not usually my prefer reading category so my expectations were relatively low.. I have to admit, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. The characters were substantial without being over the top. I really enjoyed hearing about some of the products available in the future (like the food 3D printer) it sounded so cool! The narrator did a great job playing the role of a teenage girl who is a finding her own strength.

Thanks NetGalley and Adam Boostrom for the copy!