[I am reviewing an ARC I received through NetGalley]

A really engrossing sci-fi tale, the Thinning is set in our near future - I estimated around ten or twenty years but no exact dates are given - where things are bad but (gratifyingly) never comprehensively explained. What we do know is that society has moved ever further along our path of corporate fascism via technology.

The story is told from the point of view of the teenage daughter (Fin) of two scientists, her father an astrophysicist and her mother an astrophotographer. Fin and her mother have a loving relationship but her mother is an activist who keeps a certain distance between them to protect Fin, much to her annoyance. Their field of astronomy is the main window through which we experience the dystopia as the observatory park in NSW where they work is taken out of their hands for use in running space operations for corporate interests.

Alongside this thread is another biological one: human fertility is failing at a rapid pace and there are also new mutant human strains called 'incompletes' who have eyesight that is intensely myopic, suiting staring hard at screens, but who have also been found to be fertile with 'completes' and so are seen as an object of lab study.

All of this results in Fin and her family and friends, who were all connected to the national park and the observatory, going completely off-grid, living in the Bush and avoiding government and corporate agents.

Into this situation drops Terry, an Incomplete on the run who Fin is tasked with looking after while she takes a long trip to Mount Kaputar, and so the novel takes place over a few days, charting a road trip as these two begin to know each other. A classic setup done well is what we have here, Fin moving slowly from distrust of Terry as they try to sneak past various hazards against the clock.

This kind of sci-fi can be tricky to get right for me, often I am pulled out of the world by either some sense of the author being too Luddite about technology, or thinking 'sci-fi' is a pass to allow anything to happen, as if technology were the same as magic. Inga Simpson manages to avoid over-explaining or preaching, and while we get a lot of sense from Fin's reminiscences and current troubles, enough is left up to us to fill in the blanks, which also helps to keep up the pace of the book.

I think the only real question I'm left with is exactly what 'The Thinning' is. Some oblique references are made that almost make it sound like a passage between worlds - something like Gene Wolfe's There Are Doors, maybe? - but we never get more than these passing references. Is this in fact a novel that touches on magic or a multiverse? Who knows, and in a sense it's all the better for that question that is left hanging.

I'm really glad I was given the opportunity to read this title through NetGalley. I can honestly say this was one of the most original books I read. The topic was really interesting, I just think the writing was above me and I quite often felt confused. There were a few continuity errors that weren't caught during the editing process, that also didnt help with the confusion on my part.