The Glass Box
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A tense, thought-provoking pressure cooker about a young woman imprisoned in a psychiatric facility for her political views, perfect for fans of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Girl, Interrupted.
Riley Diaz is a troublemaker, born and raised. Half Irish, half Cuban, she's an orphan with the spirit and resilience of her ancestors and the protest protocols of her late parents. She's ready and able to resist the new tyrannies.
After attending a protest, Riley is incarcerated in a shadowy American Renewal Center, detained under dangerous new legislation. This newly authoritarian government is trialling the mandatory re-education of dissidents, and Riley is receiving psychiatric treatment because of her politics.
Riley is imprisoned in a nightmarish world of persecution and incursions on her freedom - forced therapy, involuntary medication, extended incarceration, solitary confinement, grotesquely restricted rations, false accusations and more.
Trapped in an emerging dystopia, against people who would label her mad for speaking her mind, Riley can only do what she does best – rebel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Echoes of One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest reverberate through this cinematic tale from Straczynski (Together We Will Go), which transports readers to a near-future American dystopia. After second-generation activist Riley Diaz is picked up protesting a new law limiting public gatherings to 10 people, she's transported to an "American Renewal Center," a Department of Homeland Security–sponsored jail alternative in a converted wing of a psychiatric hospital, to be counseled out of her radicalism. From there, Straczynski hits the expected beats of psychological and pharmaceutical abuse and excruciating decisions about whom to trust; in these sections, the writing feels heavier on agenda than story. Fortunately, a subplot involving Riley's secret friendship with a nonspeaking and sometimes violently dangerous patient, who finds comfort in hearing Riley's sympathetic reading of Frankenstein and whose trust becomes critical to her survival, adds emotional realism and yields the least predictable pieces of the story. Though there are few surprises here, readers looking for an adrenaline-inducing resistance plot will find this worth their time. Correction: An earlier version of this review mischaracterized a plot detail.
