REVIEW: The Incubation Series

By Denise @ Life With No Plot on January 30, 2025 • ( 0 )

Another review from a couple of years ago. I don’t know what I’m gonna do when I actually get caught up with these lol.

About the Books

The Incubation Trilogy by Laura DiSilverio

Book 1

Title: Incubation

Pages: 302

Dates Read: May 14-16, 2023

Blurb: Bio-chemistry whiz Everly Jax wants one to know who her parents are. Raised with other repo kids in InKubator 9, she has pinned her hopes on Reunion Day, the annual event where sixteen-year-olds can meet or reunite with their parents. When her Reunion Day goes horribly awry, she and her pregnant friend Halla escape the Kube, accompanied by their friend Wyck who has his own reasons for leaving. In a world where rebuilding the population is critical to national survival, the Pragmatist government licenses all human reproduction, and decides who can–and must–have babies. The trio face feral dog packs, swamp threats, locust swarms, bounty hunters looking for “breeders,” and more dangers as they race to Amerada’s capital to find Halla’s soldier boyfriend before the Prags can repo her baby and force the girls into surrogacy service. An unexpected encounter with Bulrush, an Underground Railroad for women fleeing to Outposts with their unlicensed babies, puts them in greater peril than ever. Everly must decide what she is willing to sacrifice to learn her biological identity–and deal with the unanticipated consequences of her decisions.

Book 2

Title: Incineration

Pages: 294

Dates Read: May 16-18, 2023

Blurb: After soldiers storm the Bulrush compound, Everly Jax spends four months in prison, uncertain of her friends’ fates and determined to figure out who betrayed Bulrush. When she goes on trial for murder, her only hope is a mysterious lawyer who may not have her best interests at heart. After the stunning verdict, she’s convinced she has been betrayed again. A daring rescue brings her to a Defiance cell where she is overjoyed to find some of her friends alive. She’s caught up in rebel operations until the locusts display a horrendous new adaptation. Realizing she’s more valuable to Amerada in a lab than with the Defiance, Everly returns to Atlanta under a new identity to become part of the locust eradication e ort . . . and spy for the Defiance. On her own in Atlanta, she confronts an enemy from her past, makes a heart-rending discovery, and learns her parents’ identities–which divides her loyalties still further.

Book 3

Title: Regeneration

Pages: 296

Dates Read: May 19-21, 2023

Blurb: After she escapes Atlanta, Everly Jax returns to the Defiance cell in time to help capture Kube 9, her former home. There, she works feverishly with Dr. Ronan to recreate her locust eradication experiments. She is on the verge of success when an Infrastructure Protection Force general perpetrates an atrocity that leaves them all reeling. Suddenly unsure who she can trust, Everly finds her way to the Defiance’s secret headquarters, and discovers a surprising ally in the High Commander. Together with Minister Alden, they scramble to thwart a genocidal plan that threatens all the geneborns . . . including Saben. When the worst happens, Everly and her friends turn their efforts to mitigating the tragedy. A showdown at sea brings Everly face to face with the madman who hatched the genocide plot, and she must risk her life in an almost certainly futile attempt to save Amerada and her friends. The Incubation trilogy comes to a thrilling and surprising conclusion in Regeneration.

Review

This was a really good, really engaging series. You can tell I really enjoyed it by the dates when I read them. Literally couldn’t stop. I think I got the first book through BookBub and the rest, as they say, was history. I was hooked.

I always love a good dystopian story, but the thing that always needs to work perfectly is the story world. We need to have a clear idea of how things work now, how we got to this point, and what would need to be done to someday turn things back around. This story world was really cool with the Kubes and the kids who were brought up there. It’s also very clear how they got here – the Kube where we meet our main characters is plagued by huge locusts that can literally eat people. As someone who has always had a bit of a phobia about those buggers, it was really scary. I would have stayed in my Kube, no questions asked!

I also really liked that it took place in the actual United States and not a made up world. They literally go to Atlanta!

Let’s get on to characters. Everly is a really good character and slightly different from our typical dystopian heroine. She is mostly content with her life in the Kube and doesn’t initially set out to make changes. The main catalyst in changing this is trying to save her friend. It was interesting to see how they handled people having children – everything is completely controlled. So if someone steps out of line and gets pregnant outside the system . . . it’s really scary. Your baby isn’t really yours. It gets taken by the government to be placed in the Kubes.

Of course, there is a group, or several groups of rebels. I liked how the rebels were not necessarily good guys either. The relationships were all very complex in that way – just because you weren’t part of “the system” didn’t mean that you were on the “right” side. It made the story feel even more precarious, which I absolutely love in my dystopia.

Overall, if you enjoy dystopian fiction, give this one a go. It’s a lot of fun.

GoodReads rating: 4 stars for books 1 & 2, 5 stars for book 3