Verify
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
“Wow! Shades of Fahrenheit 451 and Orwell’s 1984. Painfully real and urgent. Read this book.” —Michael Grant, New York Times bestselling author of the Gone series
Bestselling author Joelle Charbonneau’s eerily timely, high-stakes page-turner is destined to start important conversations at this particular moment in our history.
Meri Beckley lives in a world without lies. When she looks at the peaceful Chicago streets, she feels pride in the era of unprecedented hope and prosperity over which the governor presides.
But when Meri’s mother is killed, Meri suddenly has questions that no one else seems to be asking. And when she tries to uncover her mother’s state of mind in her last weeks, she finds herself drawn into a secret world with a history she didn’t know existed.
Suddenly, Meri is faced with a choice between accepting the “truth” or embracing a world the government doesn’t want anyone to see—a world where words have the power to change the course of a country and where the wrong ones can get Meri killed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this dystopian thriller set in America nearly a century from now, a young woman discovers lies undermining her community when she seeks to complete her late mother's unfinished paintings. Meri Beckley, 16, just wants to become a government-approved artist and to work in Chicago's City Pride Department. But after a stranger entrusts her with a piece of paper, use of which has become heavily discouraged for environmental reasons, with the word "verify" (a term that is not recognized by society) on it, Meri begins a search for meaning that leads to an underground society of scholars dedicated to remembering the time before the U.S. government banned books, rewrote history, and erased subversive words, such as "diversity," "vulnerable," and "entitlement." But while the Stewards would rather hide away and avoid detection, Meri is determined to fight back and reveal the truth to the world at any cost. Charbonneau (the Testing trilogy) delivers a tense duology opener focusing on the dangers of censorship and the power of information. Despite a strong, entertaining story line and engaging characters, though, this hits multiple well-worn beats made familiar by its genre predecessors. Ages 13 up.)
