A queer, YA Handmaid's Tale meets Never Let Me Go about a dystopian society determined to "reform" anyone who is LGBTQ+ and the lengths to which one girl will go to save herself and her friends
Everyone hopes for a letter-to attend the Estuary, the Pines, the Glades. To attend the Meadows. These are the secret places where only the best and brightest go, to learn to burn even brighter.
When Eleanor gets her letter, she knows she's freed from her hardscrabble life by the sea, in a country ravaged by climate disaster and war. But despite the Meadows' luminous facilities, endless fields, and pretty things, it keeps a dark secret: its purpose is to reform the students inside, to condition them against their attractions, to show them that one way of life is the only way to survive. Anything else, they're told, will topple a society already on the brink of collapse.
Five years later, Eleanor is an adjudicator, making sure the Meadows' former students don't stray from the life they've been conditioned to live. But Eleanor can't escape her past, or thoughts of the girl she once loved. Because that girl isn't here anymore. What happened to her could be no one but Eleanor's fault. And as secrets emerge that set Eleanor on a dangerous but determined search for the truth, she knows if she's not careful, it could be her fate too. Stephanie Oakes is the author of The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly, which was a Morris Award finalist and a Golden Kite Honor book, and The Arsonist, which won the Washington State Book Award and was an ALA/YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults pick. An elementary school librarian, Stephanie lives in Spokane, Washington with her wife and family.
