2022-01-04
A teenage lesbian battles homophobic persecution and torture in this dystopian fable.
The novel unfolds in 2026, when President Doug Miller, a Republican who has secret reveries about having sex with enslaved men, declares his campaign to rid America of what he calls the “disease” of homosexuality. After returning home from her native New York City’s last Gay Pride parade, 17-year-old Maia Anna Robinson and her girlfriend, Aimee, are arrested by the U.S. Morality Guard and taken to a “conversion” camp with other teens. The rebelliousness of the LGBTQ+ youth kicks in after Aimee starts an uprising on the bus and is shot to death; this horror results in Maia spending much of the book mourning her lost love. Later, Maia punches out the female camp commandant, Gen. Wilson, during an orientation assembly; she’s punished with an injection that causes her unbearable pain. More torments ensue, beginning with Freudian indoctrination that insinuates that Maia’s sexuality is a pathological reaction to bad parenting. Then Gen. Wilson orders the camp kids to hurl homophobic insults at one another to undermine their queer solidarity. During a session of aversion therapy, Maia is forced to watch lesbian pornography after taking blue pills that make her nauseous; she’s then given pink euphoria pills and made to watch heterosexual pornography and upsettingly finds herself becoming aroused and even attracted to the male performers. Soon, Maia plots an escape with other inmates that will either set her free or land her in another camp with more gruesome tortures.Athena, who identifies as queer, offers a scenario that bears only a cartoonish resemblance to today’s reality, with occasional references to real-life figures, as when the government revokes the marriage license of Pete Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten. However, the author does capture a sensibility that feels authentic to its teen heroes thanks to the novel’s paranoid atmosphere and the intense energy of some of the prose and dialogue, as when Maia states, “I was born gay, and I will always be gay, and there’s nothing you can do to change it,” and Gen. Wilson responds, “You’re just a privileged freak that needs to be taught her place.” At its best, the author’s writing attains a dark, magnetic lyricism, as when Maia imagines jumping off a cliff: “that feeling of the wind rushing past you—as if you are flying, and then, the world will end in your eyes—your mind will black with a glitter of stars…and then you will be nothing.” Unfortunately, the book often bogs down in its depiction of Maia’s psychological angst, which feels claustrophobic and repetitive: “I fall into this loop, this loop of self-hatred and hating myself for hating myself, and it repeats, and it’s a downward spiral, and I don’t know how to deal with it, I don’t know how to think, I don’t know how to deal with it….” Readers won’t dislike Maia, but they may grow weary of listening to her ruminations.
A sometimes-engaging but overwrought tale of the near future that alternates between vigorous melodrama and tiresome dudgeon.
