Brilliant Genesia by Eva Barber is a genre-blending speculative science fiction novel that starts like a quiet dystopian coming-of-age story and grows into a high-stakes, reality-hopping fight for humanity. It opens in Andalia, where twelve-year-old Zara is taken to a mental health clinic because she keeps seeing a dark-haired woman in frightening, increasingly vivid “visions.” As Zara grows up, her brilliance bumps up against a society that hems girls into narrow roles, and her secret inner life becomes the seed of something much bigger. Eventually, the story pivots into adult Zara’s life as a top scientist and mother, tangled in time travel experiments, missing people, and a chilling technology called “Brilliant Genesia” that promises immortality by stripping away the parts of us that make us human.

What I kept noticing, in a good way, is how Barber writes with a strong visual hand. The early pages linger on soft colors, quiet art, robes, and ritual, which makes the control in Andalia feel normal at first, almost cozy, until you realize that is the point. Those details do more than decorate the scene. They build a kind of polite cage. I also liked that Zara’s intelligence is not presented as a quirky trait, it is a pressure point. When she is forced to stay small, you feel it in her silences, and in the way she measures what she can safely say. The writing has an earnest, direct quality. It is not trying to be cool. It is trying to be clear, and I appreciated that.

The author also makes a bold structural choice: the book doesn’t just “raise the stakes,” it changes the whole playing field. One minute you’re in a tightly controlled society with a girl being studied, and later you’re dealing with a grown Zara, the Vortex, and forces that literally call her by another name, insisting she is “Olesya Solensky,” pulling her into a broader web of dimensions and old relationships. That kind of shift can feel risky, but here it mostly worked for me because the emotional through-line stays consistent: a woman trying to protect her child, and a child trying to get her mother back. When the villain argues that “Brilliant Genesia” improves life by removing love, empathy, and messy human needs, I found myself oddly unsettled because the logic is smooth on the surface, like glass, and still wrong in the bones. And the book doesn’t let you forget the social cost either. Zara’s past includes hiding who she is, even pretending to be a man to pursue her work, which gives the later ethical questions real weight instead of making them abstract.

I’d recommend Brilliant Genesia most to readers who like speculative sci-fi with a dystopian spine, especially if you enjoy stories that start intimate and then swing wide into big-idea territory (time experiments, parallel lives, and moral battles over what “progress” means). If you want a neat, single-lane plot, the genre shift might feel like whiplash. But if you like ambitious sci-fi that’s still rooted in family bonds and anger at unjust systems, you’ll enjoy this story. And if you’re the kind of reader who finishes a book and immediately wants to talk it through with someone, it gives you a lot to think about.

Pages: 408 | ASIN : B0GF8R2N5Z