Marie's Journey — Monica La Porta

Marie just turned fifteen and can't wait to leave the Institute where she has been raised with thirty girls, all unwanted like herself. As a fathered woman, she is set to make the best she can with what she was given and dreams of when she will start training as a nurse at Redfarm, her new home. But Redfarm is far from the nurturing environment Marie had envisioned. She meets Grant and, through him, is exposed to the race of men -- the workers whose lives are worth even less than hers -- and discovers they aren't as despicable as she had been taught to believe. Before she can understand her own feelings, the longing for hugs she can't share with Grant takes hold in her heart and she soon wishes they could be anywhere else but there. Her desire is granted, but once again, reality is harsher than her dreams. Marie's Journey is a companion book in The Ginecean Chronicles, a series set in the dystopian world of Ginecea, where women rule over enslaved men and heterosexual love is the ultimate sin. Although the story is chronologically set between The Priest and Pax in the Land of Women, Marie's Journey can be read alone.