Mary Modern is one of the best debuts of the year (so good you’ll wish you’d written it yourself!). 

Lucy Morrigan is a genetic scientist at New Halcyon College who lives in her family’s Victorian house, surrounded by pictures of long-dead relatives. She’s a bit of an anachronism herself, dressing in decades-old clothes. And she’s a bit peculiar, too: she’s a loner whose best friend is her deceased father’s colleague, she rents out rooms in her house to a group of graduate students who are members of a male purity movement called the Order of St. Agatha, and she keeps an elaborate laboratory locked away in her basement.

Regardless of her quirky nature, Lucy soon attracts the attention of a classics professor named Gray. A romance soon blossoms. When she and Gray decide to try to have a child together and encounter roadblocks to conception, Lucy stumbles upon a unique solution to their problem. She decides to further her father’s research in human cloning by cloning her maternal grandmother, Mary. Using an apron scrap stained with her grandmother’s blood, Lucy embarks on her experiment and successfully clones Mary--albeit at the age of 22, rather than as an infant. 

What ensues is a fantastic journey into the wonders of human relationships, the meaning of family, and the power of love and loss, with a terrifically bittersweet twist at the end. Highbridge Audio’s production of Mary Modern is stellar and should not be missed.--Linda Arrington Lusk