This was my first Stephanie Oakes book and I was not expecting a dystopian book where life Before and life After are so different. Where life Before is life as we know it today (mostly), and life After is life where women are again treated as second-class citizens with far less rights than we have today. The "Turn" is when nature supposedly took back and righted itself. We don't learn much about the Turn, except that races, genders, and sexualities were deemed "against nature" and those are what supposedly caused upheaval (I assume flooding, starvation, climate change, etc etc, all the bad things essentially), per the Quorum, a nameless and faceless group of men.
We get to know Eleanor, a thirteen-year-old living with her adoptive mother in a rundown place called the Cove. She receives a letter inviting her to attend the Meadows, a school for the country's "best and brightest." She will attend for four years, then be introduced into society to meet a husband and fulfill her obligation to be a mother and housewife. But Eleanor knows there is something different about herself, though she has no words for it. She likes girls. But the algorithm has chosen her to attend the Meadows and off she goes to learn how to be a proper lady.
We watch Eleanor navigate two timeframes, while she is attending the Meadows and a year after she is released (graduated?) and is working as an adjudicator, checking up on fellow facility attendees who needed to be "reformed" and how they are getting along.
The book starts off pretty slow but once I hit about page 150, I was invested in Eleanor's past and present and wondering what exactly is going on in this society. I really enjoyed the book and where it went, what it had to say, how not very far we are in real life from this dystopia...
We get to know Eleanor, a thirteen-year-old living with her adoptive mother in a rundown place called the Cove. She receives a letter inviting her to attend the Meadows, a school for the country's "best and brightest." She will attend for four years, then be introduced into society to meet a husband and fulfill her obligation to be a mother and housewife. But Eleanor knows there is something different about herself, though she has no words for it. She likes girls. But the algorithm has chosen her to attend the Meadows and off she goes to learn how to be a proper lady.
We watch Eleanor navigate two timeframes, while she is attending the Meadows and a year after she is released (graduated?) and is working as an adjudicator, checking up on fellow facility attendees who needed to be "reformed" and how they are getting along.
The book starts off pretty slow but once I hit about page 150, I was invested in Eleanor's past and present and wondering what exactly is going on in this society. I really enjoyed the book and where it went, what it had to say, how not very far we are in real life from this dystopia...