Welcome to the new America, the one where everyone who reaches age 18 is shipped off to heavily controlled (albeit, dark and oppressive) compounds to work. Don’t worry, your meals and your housing are already taken care of. We’ll pay you, too. Sure, there’s a curfew and some rules… but that’s the price you pay for order.
What’s that? You don’t want to follow the rules? You don’t want to work in our compounds?
Guards!
When Reed turns 18-years-old he’s shipped off to one of several heavily controlled compounds, part of a new national order known as the Great Reorganization Operation, or GRO. Once there, he spends his days as an involuntary worker at “The Hill” where he lives in a dorm and works in a factory. He receives reasonable pay, is fed and housed, and has some hours before curfew each day to mingle with other entrapped young people. There is no choice in the matter. Suddenly, Reed’s life is not his own.
At first, he’s furious. He longs to live without the heavy-handed discipline those who fall out of line endure. His roommates, Riley and Reagan, warn him that the ruling clique known as the Council has brutal methods of treating those who speak out against their governance. Better to keep your head down, they tell him. Better to stay alive.
But then Reed notices Nathan, a guy that never seems to have a bad day. Reed wants to learn his secret. At great risk, he joins with Nathan and other young people who meet covertly. To his surprise, the group’s focus centers around how to oppose the Council, the GRO, and everything those institutions stand for. Elijah, their leader, gives Reed a radically new perspective. But nothing is perfect and soon Reed is forced into a position where he must choose to sacrifice his own safety for another’s well-being. His decision sends him on a path he could’ve never anticipated.
Debut author, Ransom Grey, offers an adventurous mix of speculative and dystopic vision for the Y/A audience. In fact, his futuristic dystopia is unnervingly close to current day America. When Stars Go Out echoes the totalitarian overlord vibe of George Orwell’s 1984 with a cast of characters who are brave and honorable pitted against the machinations of a society gone very wrong. Grey’s prose is solid, with compassionate leads and a few scenes of violence to underscore the hatefulness of the GRO and the Council.
A dark dystopian fantasy, When Stars Go Out posits a credible projection from today’s current reality of a nation led by a dark and dreadful class of elitists, with the young people secretly meeting at the GRO facility as the only ones who have the guts to save it. Mr. Grey’s work is published with Defiance Press.
Styled in the cooling off days of the Reagan era and the still heated Iran Contra imbroglio, Epstein’s Pancake features a street-wise hero afflicted by PTSD and new to the spy vs. spy game. Viet Nam vet Rob Price is not having an easy time with civilian life when a friend introduces him to a mysterious man who wants to hire him for some low-level, well-paid courier work in France – dropping things off, meeting people in airports, that kind of thing.
Living in a fantastical world filled with magic and mythical creatures, Kase Garrick is studying at The Academy. His main course of study focuses on becoming a great warrior. As he grows close to his friend Lenia, he’s influenced by what is dear to her. Lenia is working hard at becoming a well-respected and powerful wizard.
Owen Haskins is returning to his childhood home on fictional Cedar Island (which has an uncanny resemblance to Whidbey Island for those readers in the know) with his seven-year-old son Ian so they can have a new start. Ian has had trouble being bullied in his old school, and Owen is worried that new teacher, Faith Russell, may not be up to the job of helping his vulnerable son. Of course, Faith and Owen clash, while simultaneously being attracted to each other, but painful experiences in their past initially keep them from acting on their growing feelings for one another.
Sam had been a curious, resourceful child growing up in a family torn apart by a contentious past. At a very young age, he’d discovered a fascination with killing. Now almost an adult, he’s anxious to find his little sister who he’s sure is living somewhere with their mother. The mother who had abandoned him. Although he was young when they were separated, Sam remembers his sister well, including the cute green ribbons she always wore in her hair. Now author Kara Wolfe shows readers what Sam really thinks in As the Ribbons Fall.
As a black woman on a cotton farm in Mississippi in the 1960s, Janice Ellis could have resigned herself to a life full of status quo: never speaking up for herself, never speaking out against injustice or racism. Instead, she never let unsettling times define her or hold her back, even as a witness to some of the ugliest racial violence this country has seen. In her candid and thought-provoking memoir, From Liberty to Magnolia: In Search of the American Dream, Ellis vividly depicts her life in the South during the height of the Civil Rights and Women’s Rights movements.