2020-04-29
This first installment of a YA SF trilogy introduces a teenage girl in North America’s post-apocalyptic future who must masquerade as a boy to serve as the absolute leader of an isolated realm.
In Shay’s dystopian tale, it is 2185, more than a century after climate change, mass extinctions, and nuclear war ravaged Earth. Surviving nations, facing shortages, infertility, and cancer cutting down populations, have agreed to “Eco-Crisis Accords” that pledge rollbacks on all that brought about civilization’s ruin. Now, they forbid electricity and other advanced technology, international travel, and representational democracy. Instead of parliaments and congresses, an “Elected” family serves 100-year terms, with men taking charge at age 18 to enforce the Accords. In struggling, cloistered East Country—which includes what used to be Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Washington, D.C., and the Chesapeake Bay—first-person narrator Aloy and her dynasty occupy the White House, enjoying veneration, food, and no-longer-manufactured medication. But there is a price. The girl’s heir-apparent brother, Evan, ran away, leaving the inner circle no choice but to disguise Aloy as a boy, complete with an arranged fiancee, Vienne. Dutifully, Aloy ascends to the office of Elected on her 18th birthday and prepares for the sham marriage to the lovely, faithful Vienne while also earning the respect of the populace by fighting rising discontent from a faction that demands restoration of industry. In addition, outsiders may be causing trouble on the border. While there are plenty of intriguing ingredients in this YA heroine-fronted novel, the story does take sexual elements, including the Sapphic, a bit beyond the usual PG-13 territory. (But nothing gets graphic, as it seems Aloy, while educated in everything else, has never been taught exactly how babies are made.) There are abundant incidents and crises packed into a fairly tight page count. It makes a bit of a difference that the antagonists—at least in this installment—are not Hunger Games–style sadistic elite castes or power-mad dictators. They are just people in extreme circumstances trying to do the morally correct things for the greater good to flourish, even when devotion to duty means deceit and cruelty (plus some evidently great sex). A big to-be-continued hangs over the finale.
This gender-fluid tale opens a dystopian series on a high note.
