Today’s edition of “Books I Didn’t Pick” is brought to you by Partials, courtesy of a holiday book exchange.

Some books are timeless: stories that ring true from generation to generation, no matter how circumstances change. Other books are timely: it’s no surprise that Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague was a New York Times best seller for weeks in 2020, even if it was set in the 1500s.

Then there’s books that I’ll call “personally timely.” These are the ones that might not have meant as much to you if you’d read them at another point in your life, but they’re meaningful now.

Partials by Dan Wells is one of those for me.

To begin, Partials is set eleven years after the devastating Partials War. The Partials are genetically engineered super-soldiers that turned on their human creators, and then vanished. Before disappearing entirely, the Partials left humanity with a parting gift: the RM virus. The virus all but annihilated the human race, and robbed humanity of its future. Every human baby born since the introduction of the virus has died, succumbing to RM within days, if not hours.

The Defense Grid, one of the last pockets of humanity, requires all women age 18 or older to become pregnant as often as possible, in the hope that one of the babies will be born with an immunity to RM.

Kira Walker is a medical intern whose father was killed by the RM Virus. When her best friend becomes pregnant, Kira will risk her life to find a cure for RM. With every other avenue of research failing to find a cure, she will attempt to do what no one else has done. To save the life of her best friend’s child, she must capture and study one of the brutal and deadly Partials.

That’s a lot to unpack, I know. I’m sure that everyone will have a different reaction to reading a story about a pandemic now than they would have pre-2020. Before COVID, I was even working on a post-apocalyptic short story which had been brought about by a plague. I liked the possibilities that pandemic fiction offered: a reset of the world that you live in, while keeping much of the world’s infrastructure intact. It also felt like a safe, remote end of the world scenario. Nuclear war and devastating natural disasters are threats that felt much more real at the time. But after three years of a pandemic that has killed millions of people, plague-related fiction isn’t nearly as fun as it used to be. COVID-19 wasn’t the end of the world by any means, but living through it has changed the way I engage with media that use a pandemic as a plot or setting element. As for my post-apocalyptic story? I haven’t touched it since 2020, and it’s unlikely that I ever will again.

Other than the fictitious pandemic, there’s something else that triggered a strong reaction in me, which wouldn’t have been as strong if I’d read Partials as a teenager. But for a thritysomething woman who’s been married for just shy of three years now, pregnancy is kind of a huge deal.

I have baggage around pregnancy/childbirth/motherhood. It’s not severe enough that I wouldn’t be able to read a book like Partials, but instead of feeling like a dystopia, the novel felt like a horror story to me. And that’s okay. Sometimes I seek out something that I know will scare me, if only out of some eerie fascination with it. The 1996 Mount Everest disaster, for instance. Horrifying, and yet I’ve read every Wikipedia page related to it, Into Thin Air by John Krakauer (and the made for TV movie), along with watching the movie Everest, and two separate documentaries on the subject. That’s what reading about pregnancy (forced or otherwise), childbirth, and infant mortality is like for me. It’s a nightmare, but when there’s a fourth wall between it and me, it’s easier for me to engage with it. It’s a safe way to interact with something you’re afraid of.

But that’s not what you’re here for, so let’s get back into the book itself.

The writing is fine. There’s nothing stellar about the prose, but it’s not bad, either. It gets the job done, which works for the breakneck pace of the plot. However, the moments with the biggest emotional impacts sometimes feel lackluster because of it.

The plot is pretty dense, and I think the novel suffers from excess. There’s so many characters and factions to keep track of, along with their relationships with one another. Several of Kira’s friends play a role in the story. Alongside Kira, there’s her boyfriend, Marcus; foster-sisters Madison, Ariel, Xochi, and Isolde; Jayden, Madison’s brother; and Madison’s husband, Haru. There are also a plethora of other characters that the audience needs to remember and keep track of: the senators that run the island, various military and medical superiors, and members of the rebel group, the Voice. These people play no small role in the story, but it’s nigh impossible to keep track of all of them.

Then there’s also the factions in the story. Kira and her multitude of friends live in the Defense Grid, on Long Island, possibly the last human city remaining on Earth. The Grid is occasionally attacked by The Voice, a group of rebels seeking to end forced pregnancy. Both the Grid and the Voice hate and fear the superhuman Partials, who have created their own society away from the Grid and the Voice. As the story goes on, we discover that the Partials have also all subdivided into factions of their own.

It’s a lot. Sometimes I felt like I needed a notebook to keep track of what was going on. With so many characters, they can’t possible get all the time they need to be fully developed. This made many of Kira’s friends an indistinct blur, and the villains largely forgettable. They’re evil, but they’re not interesting.

There’s also plenty that I do like about this book, too. It’s exciting with plot reveals that keep you guessing. While it could be overly complicated at times, the story never stagnates. I also liked the reasons why teenagers had to be the protagonists in this book.

In YA fiction, especially dystopian YA, teenagers often get put in dangerous situations that they have no business dealing with, especially if there are adults better able to handle the situation. Partials at least does a good job of addressing this. When sixteen-year-old Kira is placed in charge of research that goes well beyond her training and knowledge, she and her friends question why the senators are allowing her to do this. Their reasons are revealed later and actually make sense.

Even more than that, Kira makes a point about why it had to be teenagers and young people to make a change, and why her generation will the ones who cure R.M. Kira and her generation are called “plague babies,” born before R.M., but too young to remember remember what the world was like before the virus. The adults do remember the old world, as well as the horrific events of the Partials uprising and the spread of R.M. Most of them have given up hope that R.M. can be cured, and refuse to take the drastic measures required to guarantee the future of the human species. Billions of humans are dead, and they’re unwilling to risk any more lives on trying to a cure. They insist on doing the same thing over again, mandating pregnancy, hoping one day a child will be born with an immunity to R.M. This has not produced a single healthy baby, yet the Senate refuses to change tactics and try something new. When the adults have given up on the future of the human race, Kira realizes that only “plague babies” like her have enough will and passion to act and try to fix things.

I remember what it was like to be a kid. I remember feeling unheard, or that no one took me seriously because I was young. Thankfully, I had parents, teachers, and adults in my life who understood that children and teenagers have something worth saying. In the wake of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, students rose up and demanded change. I observed many adults criticizing the student activists. One of the common refrains of their detractors were that they were kids, with no real-world experience and no business in telling adults what to do.

It made me think of one of my favorite high school teachers, who gave quizzes on current events and made us watch political debates as homework assignments. In 2006, he took a group of students, including me, to a Save Darfur rally in Washington, D.C. It was incredible to be there with so many like-minded people supporting a cause I cared deeply about. My teacher understood that just because we were young didn’t mean that we couldn’t be passionate about saving human lives, or civil rights, or a million other things outside of typical high school worries.

I didn’t realize how remarkable that was. At this point I’ve spent most of my career working with children and families, and I have a better understanding of how young people need to be heard. And how rare that can be.

In Partials, this is all Kira’s choice. She doesn’t have a special fate or destiny. There’s no prophecy about her. She just knows what she has to do, and she’s willing to risk everything for what she believes in.

I don’t think I’ll be reading the any of the sequels, but I liked Partials as I was reading it, even when it hit a bit too close to home.