(Hey, Nash... nice Billy Joel lyric at the end there...
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I didn't really have a problem with the theme of story, mostly because this IS the future. IIRC it's already started in some countries where girl babies are less prized than boy babies, so efforts are made to not have girl babies. Jess's impression of the unmodified/unplanned kids in the park doesn't surprise me either; I don't see it being far off when we look at kids in certain parts of town or who look a certain way and wonder why their parents didn't do something.
This was published in 2000, so it's already slightly dated, but really just in the way that we're seven years closer to it. If this had been a newer story, I'd've asked if Rusch had been watching "Idiocracy" (at least the first part, which is scarily accurate in its depiction of two types of parents -- the ones that plan and the ones that don't).
Despite all the good points it made, the story was full of cliches in the characters:
* small-town parents who don't understand why big-town daughter wants to do
x* small-town girl struggling to make it in the big city, working in a theater, wanting to be an actress
* boyfriend who's a cook
* they never see each other
* girl wants to disregard the test results, boy wants to follow them, implied statement that boy is wrong and girl is right (not saying that's my opinion or not, but that's the implied feeling I got from that exchange)
I've read a lot of Rusch's Star Trek books (all of which are written with her husband, Dean Wesley Smith), and this feels about the same. But now I can say with certainty that she is the better writer of the duo -- anyone who's read "A Hard Rain" (Smith's solo ST novel) I'm guessing feels the same way.
As for the reading... the word I would use is "halting". I feel like the reading was either overproduced (in that the reader recorded it in chunks) or the reader wasn't sure what she was looking at.
The song was pretty good -- sort of lounge-rock meets Fiona Apple's piano riffs -- but their producer might want to back off the piano a bit, as the vocals in the first two verses got lost in places. She sang it a lot better than I expected, given the reading; the voice also sounded completely different (in a good way). (Are we allowed to review the songs?
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Anyway, not one of my favorites, but I'm not unhappy that I listened to it.