Who runs the world? Girls.

In Athena’s Choice, women hold all the power -- and find themselves questioning the meaning of human existence.

Part of growing up is realizing that adults make mistakes. As adults, we learn that there are some mistakes that we can choose not to repeat.

The titular heroine of Athena’s Choice learns this lesson in the hardest way possible, when through great personal loss the 19-year-old discovers that she may be the only person on earth who can right a terrible wrong committed long ago.

The story takes place in 2099, fifty years after a virus has killed all the men on the planet. Women have rebuilt the world with feminine values -- there is no war, poverty, or hunger. Artificial intelligences and other technologies have eliminated all manual labor. The most important currency in this near-utopia is cooperation, as women work together to make the world a better place.

Though the technology exists to engineer babies of both sexes, the scientists of 2099 have long ago learned that any male babies, once born, would die of the virus. So for fifty years, doctors have only made female babies that are raised by female parents. 

The plot of Athena’s Choice mirrors the story of creation in the Christian Bible, and author Adam Boostrom uses apples -- sometimes, quite heavy-handedly --  to symbolize forbidden knowledge, like the Biblical “tree of knowledge” from which Adam and Eve ate apples, causing them to be cast out of paradise.

At the start of the book, the women of Athena’s world are having a debate. Assuming they could engineer males who are immune to the virus, should they? Would the return of men fill a missing piece of women’s hearts and psyches? Or would men bring an end to world peace and a return to violence and greed? Should women remain forever as a lone sex in this paradise they’ve built without men?

These are difficult questions for anyone to consider, and Boostrom does a great job of communicating the teenage Athena’s confusion and disbelief as immense decisions are thrust upon her. Before her story ends, she must answer an age-old question for all of humanity -- what should we do with the knowledge that we have?