Imagine the foggy air around you stank of sour eggs and your trousers were “splashed with veins of muck and dust” as you ran for dear life away from the Tower in the desert that kept you, locked and groomed by a power-hungry elite of masked women. Welcome to Jude’s dystopian world, a teenage boy bred by “Insem” in the House of Life, who is, like all the other Boys at the Auction, desperate to free himself of “debt” and become a man; perhaps to prove that he can control himself, and that to look at a woman is not to lose one’s innocence…

This speculative YA thriller was so thought-provoking and fast-paced, I couldn’t put it down. It’s smart speculative fiction, just abstract enough to feed on your curiosity without the complete confusion and chaos that comes with an entire new set of world-rules. The woman are freaky, the virtues are corrupted, the past sins of the forefathers stink, and the world outside is practically dead. It’s an incredibly bleak vision, but it isn’t one cast too far from truth, and character behaviours are certainly recognisable and illuminating. In fact, the authors understanding of power dynamics is what makes the latent action so compelling and tense.

The narration is first-person, Jude, in the present tense. He himself uses the second person singular to refer to a missing friend, perhaps dead, who acts as a kind of alter ego during the narration, and a motivation for revenge against the ruling Chancellor deemed responsible. Kettle uses highly original wordplay and compound adjectives to help build her radical vision of this world, even building exclamations based off its own elements. The language tackles the dark atmosphere with a surprisingly refreshing touch of humour and oddity. Though some action sequences may still be a little unsettling for readers. I had visions a la MAD MAX, which is very cool, but certainly not one to be stomached by everyone.

I am not widely read in the YA genre. So if the rest is as good as this, then I’ve got happy stacks of reading to do!