This novel is a prescient near-future dystopia that explores the effects of artificial intelligence on human emotion, fertility and death. Frighteningly believable and a fascinating read.

This novel was both good and bad for this dystopian fiction fan. I’ll start with the good. I loved the setting and world building. New Chicago is fully formed and a place I loved exploring through the author’s imagination. I was intrigued by the premise, a dystopian world in which women become pregnant from Insemnia. And I adored the gruff protagonist, returned soldier Carter and his sister Fred.

So what didn’t work for me? The ending. It was an unexpected letdown after such solid world and character building. There were too many loose ends and nothing was explained adequately or wrapped up. If this is part of a series, I’m happy to continue it, but if not, the ending was unsatisfactory.

I read this book around 3-4 months back and I generally remember a book's plot, it's characters and the twists quite well, at least vaguely so that I can summarise it. However when I look at it now I don't remember anything about this book except that it was compared to The Handmaid's Tale. I've not read Handmaid's... so I can't say the same for me. I could guess the story completely or at least 75% of it before I was even half way through. I had to push through the starting which was a bit of drag for my taste and preference but once I was in, it was captivating. I found that wherever the sisters were mentioned I was more than interested to read as I found the Main Character Carter extremely difficult to attach with. This was more of a 2.75 stars book for me and one time read.

For many of us, our phones might as well be glued to our hands since they're seldom more than arm's length away. In Siobhan Adcock's future-set The Completionist, they've just cut out the middleman and wearable devices are implanted directly into your arm and connected with your nervous system at a young age. They monitor your health, transmit messages directly, and all you need to do to figure out where your family members are is look, because your GPS position is uploaded automatically. So when his little sister Gardner disappears from the map, recently discharged Marine Carter Quinn is worried. His older sister Fred is even more so, and insists he try to find her. Fred would do it herself, but she's pregnant, which is something of a miracle in the post-apocalyptic Chicago they inhabit, especially since it happened naturally. Ever since the wars, when the water was poisoned and the precious artificial water was developed instead, there have been fewer and fewer babies being born, and most of them are the result of years of expensive fertility treatments.

Carter is glad to have something to do. Ever since he returned to civilian life from the outlying areas where soldiers fight to defend the shipments of water that keep the city alive, he's been having a rough time. It's not just the PTSD, which he treats with growing consumption of alcohol. It's some sort of bioweapon used against the enemy that he inhaled himself, which he can't figure out how to treat at all. He throws himself into the task of looking for Gardner, who was last working as a Nurse Completionist (a sort of midwife/specialized mother-to-be nurse) at a mysterious clinic, trying to track her down before Fred's forced marriage to the one-night-stand who knocked her up. But Gard remains out of sight while Carter goes farther and farther down into an underworld he didn't even know existed.

Let's start with a positive: I absolutely loved Fred as a character. Hard-driving and irrepressibly foul-mouthed, the book is strongest when she's on the page. While Carter and his father (one of the few other significant characters) generally seem mired in their own dramas, Fred comes in and actually moves things forward. In the back half of the book, we get a long series of past conversations between Fred and Gard before the latter's disappearance, and I wanted it to go on forever because she was such an entertaining, lively presence. I basically wanted the entire book to be from her perspective.

But it wasn't, and the choice that Adcock made to have Carter as the protagonist was a significant factor in the book's failure to launch, for me. He's not honestly very interesting, and spends most of his time either drunk or fighting off symptoms of his poison exposure, which makes everything that happen seem disconnected from reality in a way that was not effective. And, not to spoil the book, but the post-apocalyptic world it's set in, in which women who do get pregnant are subjected to almost impossible demands to care for their child literally as soon as its conceived, didn't hold up to scrutiny for me. It would seem that if babies are rare and precious, there'd be more support for the mother rather than punishments. I get the parallel she was going for with our own world, with the expectations we put on mothers and very real pushback they get for failing to meet them perfectly, but I didn't think it really worked in the way she tried to scale it up to official government policy in a world experiencing a fertility crisis. While I'm generally interested in the wave of feminist dystopia that's been pretty trendy in the book world lately, this is not a strong example of a genre and everything about this book apart from Fred is forgettable. I don't recommend it.

In the realm of speculative fiction, the line between “inspired by” and “derivative of” is gossamer thin. It can be wonderful to read works that wear their influences proudly, but if influences are all the reader sees, the story ultimately falls short.

But sometimes you read a book that pulls from the stories that have come before while also generating something with heft and impact, something that feels timely and thoughtful, something that is reminiscent of what has come before without ever feeling like a facsimile.

Siobhan Adcock’s “The Completionist” is just such a book, a vivid rendering of a bleak near future where water shortages have led to scientific solutions with unintended consequences – consequences that have put the future of mankind into question.

In the future, climate change and other factors have led to water scarcity. The civil conflict surrounding that scarcity has led to significant societal collapse, though cities that crumbled have been largely rebuilt by the powers that be into “New” cities that are home to the remaining elite. Science has engineered a water substitute – dubbed H2.0 – that has an unexpected, but never examined consequence: infertility.

Those fertility issues lead to massive governmental control over the various aspects of reproduction, with draconian rules in place that are almost impossible for anyone but the wealthiest of the wealthy to appropriately follow. The implications for women are bleak, with those in control exerting that control over every aspect of these increasingly rare pregnancies.

Carter Quinn is a young soldier back from the decades-long wars that have been raging over water – wars being fought on battlefields you might not expect. They’re the same wars in which his father fought … and the same wars that the next generation will likely fight as well. Carter fights insurgents with “triggers,” deadly weapons whose full effect is not truly understood by the men who wield them.

Suffering from an unknown illness and PTSD, Carter comes home on leave. His sister Fred has become pregnant – completely naturally, no less – which is just short of a miracle; however, she’s leery of the regimented reality into which this event has placed her. Meanwhile, his other sister Gardner, who works as a Nurse Completionist – a medical professional who specializes in doing whatever it takes to ensure the carriage of healthy pregnancies to term – has disappeared following months of erratic behavior.

Despite his own issues – his dark memories, his creeping illness, his alcoholic tendencies – Carter undertakes to find Gardner at Fred’s behest. And the clock is ticking – Fred’s marriage to her baby’s father, scion of a wealthy health care family, is looming … and she refuses to go through with it without Gardner by her side.

What Carter discovers is that there is much more to everyone in his family – his sisters, his father – than he ever knew. Secrets are abundant, even in a world where the most intimate aspects of life have been quantified and commodified. Bringing those secrets into the light could be their salvation … or their doom.

Dystopian visions are seemingly a dime a dozen in the speculative realm these days, so finding something that stands apart is relatively rare. That’s what “The Completionist” does. The reader might capture tonal or thematic similarities to other works here – Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” is an obvious comp, though there are others – but one never gets that lazy writing vibe that springs from more derivative work.

Instead, Adcock has given us a tragic, flawed hero making his way through a tragic, flawed world. Part of what makes that world so effective is the feeling of possibility that infuses it; the America that Carter Quinn and his family inhabit is close enough to our own that we can see the paths that society would have to travel to get there from here. It’s bleak and painful and sad, rendered with a ferocity that makes the whole thing that much more immersive.

And the HOW of that world’s creation is interesting as well. I’m a fan of less is more in terms of expository development. World-building is always better when it happens contextually; the societal and social structures of this alternative America are teased out slowly, with bits and pieces coming out organically. This isn’t about hand-holding; we learn plenty about the world, but not through third-person narration or in-story info dumps. It’s a fascinating, engaging setting meticulously rendered.

“The Completionist” is the best kind of speculative fiction, smart and sharp. Its themes and ideas challenge readers while the narrative and characterizations capture and hold their imagination. There’s plenty of dystopian fiction out there, but very little of it is anywhere close to this good … and you’ll be hard-pressed to find any that’s outright better. Powerful and thoughtful, this is a book that will stick in your synapses long after the last page is turned.

I always enjoy an interesting work of speculative fiction. This one did not disappoint. It is set at an indeterminate time in the future, in the United States. Environmental changes have made water a scarce and costly resource which must be produced in a distant location and transported through disputed territory. This has led to long term warfare that is destroying a generation of young men. We have following the personal struggles of one of them. But the main concern of the book is for the work and mission of "completionists", nurses who accompany women undergoing artificial insemination, or who miraculously get pregnant naturally. The birth rate has plummeted and children havee become so precious that strict protocols must be followed by women to care for themselves and their offspring under threat of large fines. The sister of the young man I referred to before is such a nurse and another sister gets pregnant. This is the perfect pretext to explore all the issues of the ethics of completion work, the constraints on pregnant women and mothers, and of the personal consequences of war such as PTSD and contamination by chemical warfare agents. This novel is loaded with issues, and its a good story.

I received this book via ARC from Netgalley. Thank you to Netgalley.

I love the Dystopian fiction that I've read previously, Children of Men, The Handmaids Tale, Wool and I was excited to be given this novel to read and review... but that is where the excitement ended for me for reasons I'll outline below.

The story starts off well, the world has gone to the dogs, real water is non-existant, except for the very rich. Climate change and wars over resources have left the country decimated. Water has to be engineered as does most of the food. During the course of the book, we find out that fertility is almost non-existant, probably due to the water and only the very rich can afford fertility drugs 'Insemina' or a lucky few get pregnant naturally. Here is where I had trouble following - if a woman does get pregnant, the state lobbies heavy 'care hours' on her, to maintain care for the unborn child and make sure that the mother to be is taking care of herself. Failure to comply results in crushing fines. Not only for her but her family too. Poor mothers are overwhelmed by the burden.

In order to circumvent the system, women resort to maiming themselves to get the care hours reduced. Here we meet the protagenist, Carter, a former marine in the wars out west. Feeling guilty for having to fight 'raiders' looking for the precious H20 he is protecting, he drinks his days away in his civilian life. When he learns that his sister Gard has gone missing, he devotes his engineered-beer addled days looking for her. To add to his problems, his other sister Fred is naturally pregnant and not happy about it.

So, good premise right? Yes, but from about a third of the way in, the book started to drag for me. I felt dissapointed as I should have been eagerly turning the pages, but I just found it a chore to read. I just finished the novel today and found it ended abruptly with no real answers to the questions I had formulated along the way.

THE COMPLETIONIST, by Siobhan Adcock, is set in a future where water is gone and their are constant wars over the engineered replacement water. On top of that, birth rates are remarkably low, even with scientific engineering to help women get pregnant. The government has taken control of the entire pregnancy and birthing process, taking all of the beauty and wonder out of child birth and turning it into as an emotionally sterile and business-like process as possible. Carter Quinn has returned from war to find out his sister, Fredericka, is pregnant naturally, which is almost unheard of, and his other sister, Gardner, who is a Nurse Completionist (someone who helps women and families through this arduous pregnancy and birthing process) has disappeared. Before Fredericka gets married and has her baby, she asks Carter to find Gardner and his search unveils truths Carter wishes he had never found.
The backdrop of this dystopian world aside, Adcock has written a story about family, war, and societal survival. Each sibling, along with their father they call Pop, has a different take on what is right and wrong in this morose future and each one has different ideas on how to make it better for themselves. In desperate times, should a community become involved with someone's pregnancy to help save the human race? Is war necessary even if the soldier's aren't sure what they are fighting for anymore? When is finding gray areas in the rules and ways around the laws of your world ok and when isn't it? Adcock presents these topical issues among others as unbiased as possible. The plot itself is predictable, no real twists or surprises along the way. And the most well written and entertaining character is Fredericka, called Fred by her family, because she has no filter and is unabashedly and often humorously blunt.
Adcock paints a future where everyone struggles in THE COMPLETIONIST and by doing so, forces the reader to consider war, governmental control, and family bonds. A thought-provoking , emotionally dense book that leaves the reader to decide how they feel on those heavy topics.

On the whole, it was good. I am not usually fond of dystopian fiction, but there are occasions when i feel like reading something different to my norm. If you enjoy dystopian, then i will say that this book is worth a read.

Adcock has woven several popular themes together in this dystopian tale of a world without water. Consumption of artificial water leads to infertility but the rich can still manage to get pregnant and some do so naturally. Carter has returned, damaged, from the war over resources and is trying to find his sister Gardner, a completionist who helps women with their pregnancies. His other sister, Fred, is naturally pregnant, which comes with a great deal of government interference. There are interesting concepts and characters and it's well written. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. It's a bit of a slog at first and it never quite achieved the same level of readability of some dystopian fiction but I recommend for those who like the genre.

I will admit that getting into this book took me a few tries but once I did - I was hooked. This dystopian future is terrifying but realistic, something that isn't too out there. I loved the mystery of where Gard was and the unreliability of the main character. If you have a hard time getting into this book - push through! It's worth it.

The Completionist by Siobhan Adcock is the post apocalyptic world of The Handmaid’s Tale meets the technicality of a book like The Martian. It was more sci-fi and technical than I expected, I often lost the story in the details. But I can imagine some readers would enjoy that more than I did, I give this book a 2.5 stars, rounded up to 3 because it could be due to mood that this book wasn’t connecting to me as a reader.

Thanks Netgalley and the publisher a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

In an America in the near future, there is little natural water and most is artificially engineered. The people have technological portals embedded in their skin, which keep track of their every movement. There’s a fertility crisis and those women who do become naturally pregnant are considered miracles but their independence is taken away from them and they’re fined for every small thing they do that isn’t within a certain code that has been set up to ensure the safety of these babies, a code that is practically impossible to adhere to.

Carter Quinn is a marine who has fought the battle to protect the engineered water and now has come home after 2 and a half years. He’s obviously ill from the “triggers” used in battle. His sister, Fred, has miraculously conceived and now has permission to wed. She’s frantic due to the disappearance of their sister, Gard, a Nurse Completionist, one who helps women through their pregnancies. Carter sets off on a quest to find Gard.

The author has created a unique and horrifying future world, yet doesn’t explain how we got to this point. Apparently, the problem was in the water and therefore there is now a need to engineer water. The main characters are each have their own distinctive voices and you can tell who’s telling the story or writing a letter just by their written voice, which I believe shows the author’s talent. The characters are very realistic and down to earth and believable, except for Carter. While I liked the guy, I found the character to be very frustrating. Granted, he was ill from whatever was being used as a weapon in the war and was not thinking clearly. But he was constantly drunk which just didn’t seem to go with his determination to find his sister. The thought “you can’t be that stupid” came to mind too often.

The most problem I had with this book was that I found it to be very repetitious and far too drawn out. Also it seemed to be very unrealistic that such a ridiculous child care code would be set up, which defeated the purpose of protecting these treasured unborn children. But it was an interesting concept and I found it to be a horrifying world for women to live in. Just the fact that women’s independence was so jeopardized by this situation compelled me to keep on reading.

I feel like this is a typical "dystopian" type novel. Some parts were very engaging and other parts were a bit of a struggle to get through.

I will say that my biggest struggle were the characters. I just didn't care much for any of them.

My thanks to netgalley and Simon and Schuster for this advanced readers copy.

I'm still trying to decide how I feel about this book. The main character whose sister has gone missing, reminds me slightly of Haymitch from Hunger Games. Underneath the train wreck he was, he did really care about this family. I did wind up enjoying him and at some point relating to him, which is a true testimate to how wonderful Siobahn Adcock can write.

This book also had under currents of the Handmaids Tale. Only chosen ones can be pregnant but they are usually rich but they are also give up pretty much everything,

Siobhan Adcock has written a compelling novel set in a near-future in which infertility has caused a dramatic decrease in the birth rate, environmental disasters have caused catastrophic collapse, and water is no longer naturally available but must be engineered. She builds this world piece by piece, never descending to that annoying habit some authors have of just explaining everything up front. We learn how this new world works through various details that combine to paint a devastating portrait.

At heart, this story is about family and the love and conflict that binds parents and children and brothers and sisters. Carter is a Marine, recently back from two years at war in what used to be California. His oldest sister is pregnant – a minor miracle – and his younger sister is missing. In his search for her, he learns just how far society goes to protect the few children who are born and what the cost of that protection is. Carter is a mess – he’s been badly wounded in war, has developed a severe drinking problem, and can’t seem to make a good or responsible choice most of the time. But he loves his sisters fiercely, and it is this love that redeems him as a character. Adcock writes him very realistically – flaws and all – and he is hard to like or root for. But in his insistence on learning what happened to his missing sister and on protecting his other sister as much as he can, we see that at his core, he is a good man.

The Completionist started off a bit slow for me, but I am glad I persevered. It’s an intriguing premise, and while nothing is resolved neatly, the ending was satisfying in a way a lot of novels aren’t – it was in keeping with the story and the characters and the world that Adcock created.

Fantastic little look at a near-future scenario that is scarily realistic. Kind of a cross between 'Handmaid's Tale' and '1984', with solid writing and characters you really get to know and care for.

The description for this book compares it to The Handmaid's Tale, which is true as far as the overall scenario is concerned. But it reads more like a techno-thriller and I really enjoyed it. Besides the fast paced action, I liked the way the mystery of the protagonist's missing sister unfolded through a series of emails juxtaposed against the main narrative. This was the first novel I read by Siobahn Adcock and I'm looking foward to reading more of her work.

Siobhan Adcock's novel, "The Completionist" was a whirlwind of a read, leaving me engrossed in its storyline and concerned for its characters. Set in a future where a government system controls its citizens lives through electric monitors inserted in everyone's arms and access to clean water, we meet a young soldier, CQ, who comes home to search for a beloved sister who has disappeared. This sister, Gardner, is a Completionist, a type of medical specialist working to facilitate successful pregnancies in a time when fertility rates are dangerously low. As CQ and his older sister Fred search for Gardner, a whole world of corruption, government control, and a rising resistance unfolds before them. Adcock expertly leads the reader through astonishing truths that are revealed at just the right moment. The story is suspenseful and heartbreaking; it is a completely satisfying read.

There has been a good amount of female authored dystopian fiction lately concentrated on babies. Fertility appears to be a fertile subject. Certainly a relevant one in these days of increasingly terrifying politics, but still it seems so gender specific, maybe a case of write what you know or even write what you fear. Anyway, this is yet another one of those books and sadly not the best of the bunch. Particularly sadly since I seem to be the first person to review this one on GR. Mind you, this isn’t to flat out dis The Completionist, it’s a quite well written book with some interesting and original ideas, but it does have some detractors, the chief one being pacing. The bulk of the book (minus the flashbacks) actually takes place over a course of only several days, reading it shouldn’t feel like several days. Ok, I did read it in a day, but it moved slowly, partly due to the being overly detailed, partly due to repetition, partly due to just a deliberately exhaustively protracted narrative. The plot is essentially a young Marine returning from a war who sets off to find his sister, while also dealing with his other very pregnant sister’s impending nuptials and his strict disapproving father. What makes it stand out is that the story takes place in a future America devastated by natural disasters, deprived of water, with ravaged coasts and some cities in between rebuild and renamed New this or that, the story is set in New Chicago. There’s an ongoing decades long internecine war, the army in charge of protecting deliveries of engineered food and water are fighting those left outside of the new cities struggling to survive. And, of course, the baby crisis. Only 31000 births a year or so. Creating a correlated societal paradigm change…the relationships with low to no chance of procreation are deprioritized, so it’s s somewhat promiscuous world. The really interesting thing is that those who do managed by chance or design to get pregnant are treated…well, insanely. The women are essentially expected to sign their lives away and become functional incubators (sort of logical given the odds), while maintaining nearly impossible standards of care, strictly monitored and (this isn’t logical at all) restrictively financially punitive. Wait…what? So there’s a drastic shortage of babies being born with all the concordant ramifications (no future, etc.) and mothers to be are being fined? Fined? Punished? The wealthy can barely afford it, the others have to go as far as maim themselves for credits. Why wouldn’t the government encourage and support these babymamas? WTF? Unless this was meant to be a sort of social satire about the fact that US is the only first world country without proper paid maternity/paternity leaves, it just doesn’t add up. And it really doesn’t read as a satire either. It’s a pretty meticulously built world that frustratingly lacks rationality in its LEGO bricks. There’s also the fact that the disappeared sister mystery is dragged out so exasperatingly with only the tiniest nuggets of information dispersed…it becomes difficult to care. This is why I quit watching Glitch…pacing, everyone, pacing, don’t pose more questions that are answered. This book, particularly its stretched out dénouement, is much like a theatre play, without the inherent theatrical intimacy or immediacy. Just imagine watching a play where everyone narrated their thoughts out loud soliloquy style…it’s kinda like that. For a debut The Complitionist isn’t without a promise, it’s properly bleak for a dystopia, it showcases some genuinely good writing and imagination. There’s a chance it was too eerily prescient...reading about a country that seems determined to shoot itself in a foot and continue dancing. But the main emotion evoked for me was frustration, which probably isn’t what a book strives for with its audience. Who knows what this one might have been with a different editor, actually I’d be very interested to read other reviews of the book and/or author interviews to see some other takes or the behind the scenes thinking that went into this. This isn’t a sort of thing to eagerly recommend personally, but might very well be an acquired taste. Is there a subgenre for this yet? Baby fi? I’m still not sure why anyone wants to reproduce in a dystopia. It just doesn’t seem like an ideal place to bring life into. Then again everyone’s always been very unreasonable about procreation, so maybe that’s the moral right there. Something to think about anyway. Thanks Netgalley.