I love the way she uses her science fiction as background for very character-driven stories. It’s hard to talk about Taylor Five without spoilers, but essentially it’s the story of a teenaged human clone, Taylor, who has to come to terms with both her own identity and sense of self and figure out how to relate to the genetic mother she’s an exact copy of, even though that genetic mother gave her up to be not only raised, but also gestated, by someone else. Set against the backdrop of a forest monkey preserve in the fictional African state of Kandah, where our protagonist has been happily allowed to run wild while being raised by the biologists she’s always known as her parents–scientists who, like most of the other adults in the story, work for a biotech corporation. With rebels and political unrrest mixed in as well.
One one level, the issues Taylor deals with are shaped by the biotech of the story, and couldn’t exist without it; on another, they’re the issues that every kid coming of age has to deal with.
Ann Halam is better known as the adult writer Gwyneth Jones, and based on her YAs, it’s clearly time for me to start reading some of those adult books, as well, especially since I’m almost out of YA titles by her, now.
As a side note, sometimes I’m tempted to engage in a program of reading books set in fictional countries and kingdoms hidden in various corners of the world as we know it. It’d be an interesting comparative study, I think. (ETA: with the help of Wikipedia’s list of fictional countries.)