Briar and Rose have had to leave their mother behind and their stepfather has hidden them away to keep them safe from an unknown something. What IS known? That the red lines are not good. That to be "unverifiable" is to be unsafe and that Briar will have to do something about their situation if their stepfather doesn't come back when he says they will.
This book threw me for a loop with it's indirect plotting and wobbly chronology - trying to figure out where in time I am and who is telling their story. But I figured it out, and it floored me sometimes with it's wordplay and skillful use of language. I mean, so beautiful, the ways that
words can be dissected and repurposed and used to help our human brains make sense of what is happening around us. The Britain of this story is a fact-collecting, control-freak of a bad machine that has no compassion for difference or for not toeing the line of their rules. The way that Bri's gender is handled is both lovely (with words) and terrifying (the way that power can make decisions FOR us). Rose, this precious and precocious younger sister, I found nearly everything she said to be profound and yet obvious in the ways that truth just feels like solid ground sometimes. Her innocence made all the dystopian crazy be in even starker contrast.
I even loved the actual physical layout of the words, the headings and the funky punctuation, it made me feel off balance just like the story did, just as I think it is MEANT to do. This is a world that doesn't feel all too unfamiliar to the one we are in now, like we could BECOME this if we don't catch ourselves.
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