A brutal slice of through-the-cracks childhood in a dystopic Australian future. I had emotional difficulty with this orphange-as-industry setting - it's too real, too harsh, and though it's centred on the older kids, it shows in passing the infants, and every single time it screwed my stomach into knots. (Probably doesn't help that my bub is sick right now.) For the first twenty pages or so, it was touch-and-go, but by then the strong, sardonic, starkly descriptive - and incredibly Australian - first-person narrator voice had me hooked.

So basically, this is horrible, with a dash of hope, and it's so well delivered. ( )

Welcome to Orphancorp is a chilling read. It’s a semi-futuristic dystopia in which the central character Mirii negotiates slavery in a brutal system designed to achieve compliant child workers. These are the opening lines:

I twist my hand at a weird angle to get to the itch on my wrist below the shackle. I mean, they call them ‘the Consequences of movement violations’, but shackles is what they are. When I forget to refer to them as such I get ‘the Consequences of speech violations’, which is pretty much just a gag. No one cares what I call that because everything sounds the same with a mouthful of rubber, doesn’t it?

The bus is ancient and jammed with kids, skinny bums jammed onto the bench seats. (p.1)

But as you can tell even from these brief lines, Orphancorp has failed to suppress Mirii’s personality and she has an engaging recklessness which serves her well. Yes, it is risky to break the rules when, at almost eighteen years of age, she is so close to release but she has an irrepressible spirit. It is that spirit that makes this otherwise grim novella bearable to read.

Compliance at an Orphancorp facility is achieved with punishments that escalate in severity to include solitary confinement with bread and water, and vividly depicted physical torture. But – beyond the sardonically named Aunties and Uncles who administer the institution – someone in charge has decided that the littlest kids – babies to four year olds – need human love and affection if they are to mature into usable workers. So the older orphans are assigned as nannies to care for them. But after that, physical contact consists only of punishment until the kids take matters into their own hands and have secret cuddle sessions. But they are obviously not so secret because it’s part of the grand master plan that the emerging sexuality of the adolescents will produce more babies in due course…

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/09/07/welcome-to-orphancorp-by-marlee-jane-ward-bo... ( )