THE GIVEAWAY
Since by definition the story in subsequent books follows on from what has gone before ... it is especially difficult in a trilogy to give readers an outline of books two and three without taking the edge off a few surprises. So if you don't want spoilers, read no further!
Between 1914-1918 the British Eugenic Society advocated the safeguarding of superior genes from invading forces by placing aristocratic children with working class families and destroying their records. As can be seen from the Brief Notes on Eugenics below, the path from blinkered belief to Armageddon proved horrendously short. So much more so may be the progression from Dolly the Sheep to cloning people.
Related by the heroine THE GIVEAWAY is a story of the repercussions. It is essentially a quest, and like many quests, because you're unaware it's a needle you're looking for in that heap of straw, what you expect to find may turn out to be only the start. As Adele Buckingham discovers to her cost when she turns up long-held secrets ... and comes to a revolting yet unavoidable conclusion.
Ricocheting between the false trails laid by her enemies, Adele will be lucky if she lives long enough to unravel the mystery no-one wants her to solve.
The books
THE GIVEAWAY comprises three volumes:
Take 2- driven by her disgust at the answer she has discovered, and her need to know why her father died.
Take 3 driven by her brother's disappearance.
Eugenics - A brief note
Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term 'eugenics' in 1883. He defined it as: 'The science of improving stock - not only by judicious mating, but whatever tends to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.' Darwin himself in 'The Ascent of Man' declared that genius 'tends to be inherited.'The eugenic goals of the need to multiply the desirables and stem the tide of race degeneration, spread worldwide - especially during the early 1900's. Many prominent people supported the Movement, including: George Bernard Shaw, Neville Chamberlain, Alexander Graham Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. Who all felt that they and their children's future was being threatened by the faster, greater, proliferation of lesser mortals who were wrecking the nation's moral and physical fibre. The trouble was, as historian Daniel Kelves remarks in his book, In the Name of Eugenics: 'eugenicists identified human worth with the qualities they presumed themselves to possess.'
Between 1914 and 1916, convinced that German invasion was inevitable and aware of the messianic German belief in superior genes, it is no great stretch to suppose that the eugenicists believed the invaders would annihilate the cleverest children in order to reduce any future opposition. Against which eventuality the British would have taken precautionary measures.
However, extreme interpretations lead to extreme behaviour. The involuntary sterilisation of 'undesirables' seen in Nazi Germany in 1933 and to some extent in the USA, soon escalated even further ... into genocide: a biological cleansing of the world, as one group saw it.