This young adult dystopian novel is set in a post-war near-future United States in which the Bill of Rights has been revoked and replaced with "the Moral Statutes.” First, the negative: I felt as if I was getting psychological whiplash from the overwrought emotions of the point-of-view character, Ember. Her thoughts are rather overwritten, and her character would've been better served with a style dedicated to more showing and less telling, as the old saying goes. For example, in her internal monologue in a single scene, she goes from being floored by the discovery that her once-boyfriend kept all of her letters and carried them with him across the country against incredible odds, to accusing him in the next moment of finding her to be completely insignificant.

The positive, though, is positive. I was hesitant at first, reading the latest in a long, long line of “moral conservatives blur the line between church and state” YA dystopias —the most successful in recent times, to my mind, remains Bad Faith by Gillian Philip—but Simmons takes it a plausible step further, showing not only the corruption that this system fosters, but also the steps leading to it. One of the more subtle and thought-provoking insights of the novel is the point about how the new state emerged after the suffering of the war and provided services people wanted, and these services in turn made people dependent on that state and less likely to balk as they were systematically stripped of their rights. I wanted to enjoy this novel more than I did, but I really do appreciate its strengths, and it's incredibly relevant to our interests.