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From the Book Jacket:
A big-hearted dystopian novel about the corrosive effects of fear and the redemptive power of love.
With soaring literary prose and the tense pacing of a thriller, the first-time novelist Peyton Marshall imagines a grim and startling future. At the end of the twenty-first century-in a transformed America-the sons of convicted felons are tested for a set of genetic markers. Boys who test positive become compulsory wards of the state-removed from their homes and raised on "Goodhouse" campuses, where they learn to reform their darkest thoughts and impulses. Goodhouse is a savage place-part prison, part boarding school-and now a radical religious group, the Holy Redeemer's Church of Purity, is intent on destroying each campus and purifying every child with fire. We see all this through the eyes of James, a transfer student who watched as the radicals set fire to his old Goodhouse and killed nearly everyone he'd ever known. In addition to adjusting to a new campus with new rules, James now has to contend with Bethany, a brilliant, medically fragile girl who wants to save him, and with her father, the school's sinister director of medical studies. Soon, however, James realizes that the biggest threat might already be there, inside the fortified walls of Goodhouse itself. Partly based on the true story of the nineteenth-century Preston School of Industry, Goodhouse explores questions of identity and free will-and what it means to test the limits of human endurance.
Reviews:
Marshall’s debut imagines a near-future America in which the environment is degraded, the social fabric is unraveling, and foreign wars are never-ending. Sound familiar?
James is one of the young boys placed in the Goodhouse system when mandatory genetic testing reveals he has “certain biometric markers” common in violent criminals. Raised as wards of the state, James and his fellows are trained in “right-thinking” so they can be released at 18 to join society, though only those with Level 1 status will be fully assimilated. Meanwhile, they’re subject to the arbitrary, brutal supervision of proctors and class leaders. And recently, a group of religious fanatics called Zeros has been attacking Goodhouses, claiming the boys are unredeemable and must be killed: “Only then would the oceans teem once more with life…the weather normalize…would there be peace.” It’s a good setup, and Marshall gives us an appropriately troubled protagonist, haunted by memories of the deadly Zero attack on his former Goodhouse in Oregon. Relocated to Ione, California, James soon gets into trouble thanks to his encounter on Community Day with a civilian girl named Bethany; she’s contemptuous of the pieties James carefully utters and encourages him to break the rules. Far more dangerous than James’ attraction to Bethany is his tangled connection with her father, Dr. A.J. Cleveland, a researcher (and covert Zero ally) at the Ione Goodhouse who protects James only because he needs a guinea pig for his dangerous drug experiment. The plot moves briskly, with James and his friend Owen losing their Level 1 status and sinking into the Goodhouse depths while Zero activity becomes more aggressive, culminating in an attack on Ione. A cautiously optimistic ending offers some hope but shows this world still insecure and unjust.
Well-plotted and written but lacking any truly original spark that would distinguish it in the increasingly crowded genre of dystopian fiction starring hard-pressed young adults.
-- Kirkus Reviews
James, the narrator of Marshall’s dystopian debut, is a student at Goodhouse: the part-school/part-penitentiary of the future, responsible for the reeducation of children who carry a genetic marker predisposing them to crime. At age 17, James is still innocent, but when he steals a barrette from a young girl’s room on an outreach day, the discovery of his first crime sets in motion a complex string of overlapping plots with James near their center. Among the threats to James is the Zeros: militant activists bent on cleansing the world of the criminally predisposed by whatever means necessary, their threat around every corner. Bethany, the teen whose barrette James stole, insists on pushing her way into his life, though her love could get James killed. Dr. Cleveland, Bethany’s enigmatic father, may be James’s only ally among the Goodhouse staff. Or he may be a terrorist. It depends on whether James’s prescription-tainted, increasingly unreliable perspective can be trusted. Marshall’s novel moves well, and the adolescent James is convincingly off-balance throughout. The result is a genre-bending thriller with a literary voice that at times trades heart for velocity but ultimately pleases. -- Publishers Weekly
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