Forbidden DNA — A Society Where Sex is Forbidden is a Sci-fi romance. It’s not often I get to read one of these, so I was pretty excited to start it.
It starts off pretty predictable — in the future, people tend to have children with partners that will give them the best traits that they pick out. So you pick a partner that say, is tall and intelligent, then you choose things like eye color, hair color, ect. The standard status quo of a futuristic society. This story goes a step further and says all sex is forbidden. They take hormone suppression pills to prevent puberty. When they have children, it’s a process started by and approved by the government and done by artificial insemination.
The heroine, Shino, is deciding on what traits her child will have at a cafe when a man laughs at her. She gets offended and chases after him, and he gives her a location and a time.
The location is a place called “Underground” where people are free to fall in love and mess around without consequence. The man, Yamato, starts teaching her about what humans did before the government took over.
Hmm, I liked the concept, but the execution gets messy. It starts off strong. She’s curious, a bit naive, and Yamato is a mysterious and sexy lead. But after the first few twists, it gets into an incest story line where Shino’s mother, who had an affair with Yamato’s father, thinks Shino and Yamato are related.
I… was not expecting that with this sort of story line. I know I like my stories to be unpredictable, but this was waaay too into it. You’re already invested in the couple, and then they throw this at you? 
I have to admit I was turned off at this point and only finished reading because I was already neck deep into it. In the end, it’s waived off as it being a misunderstanding and they’re not really related.
But Shino was conceived the old fashioned way and born the old fashioned way with Yamato’s father providing the sperm, so to speak. The origin of Yamato isn’t really touched on. It’s just said “oh it’s not true” without much in a way of an explanation, and I never really felt any relief.
So up until that point, I really dug the story. But from that point on, I didn’t.
