Veracity
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Harper Adams was six years old in 2012 when an act of viral terrorism wiped out one-half of the country's population. Out of the ashes rose a new government, the Confederation of the Willing, dedicated to maintaining order at any cost. The populace is controlled via government-sanctioned sex and drugs, a brutal police force known as the Blue Coats, and a device called the slate, a mandatory implant that monitors every word a person speaks. To utter a Red-Listed, forbidden word is to risk physical punishment or even death.
But there are those who resist. Guided by the fabled "Book of Noah," they are determined to shake the people from their apathy and ignorance, and are prepared to start a war in the name of freedom. The newest member of this resistance is Harper -- a woman driven by memories of a daughter lost, a daughter whose very name was erased by the Red List. And she possesses a power that could make her the underground warriors' ultimate weapon -- or the instrument of their destruction.
In the tradition of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Laura Bynum has written an astonishing debut novel about a chilling, all-too-plausible future in which speech is a weapon and security comes at the highest price of all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this emotionally gripping first novel, Harper Adams, a Monitor capable of reading people's emotions, identifies enemies of the Confederation of the Willing, a nasty dystopian state reminiscent of 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale. Like everyone else, she has a "slate" implanted in her neck, primed to execute her if she utters one of the many words that have been outlawed or "Red-Listed" by the government. Pushed to revolt when her daughter's name, Veracity, is Red-Listed, Harper is recruited by the resistance and becomes their secret weapon. Bynum makes her protagonist's emotional turmoil painfully believable and creates a number of other interesting and thorny characters, but her plot is occasionally incoherent. Though the cartoonishly powerful Confederacy is never entirely convincing as a workable totalitarian state, its opponents also seem too quixotic and undermanned to fight it as successfully as they do.
