The Meadows - Softcover

Oakes, Stephanie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593619633 ISBN 13: 9780593619636

Verlag: Penguin Young Readers Group, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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.
 

  

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A queer, YA Handmaid's Tale meets Never Let Me Go about a dystopian society bent on relentless conformity, and the struggle of one girl to save herself and those she loves from a life of lies.

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Chapter 1
I glance up at the eye, a shining black bead atop an old telephone pole. I walk briskly through pelting droplets, head bent. A cascade of water skims off my hood.
I show my face again to the bead on the awning of a shopping center, and again to one on the bus shelter where people huddle like cattle.
Each eye, memorized.
Not to see them. For them to see me.
My face.
I’ve become very familiar with it since I moved to the city. When I arrived a year ago, I found a book about the muscular system, fallen behind the desk bolted to the wall in my room. The apartment block where I live was a girls’ college dormitory once. The book must’ve slipped back there, forgotten by some long-ago student when women could still attend universities.
I hid it beneath my mattress, memorized the meaty striations bisecting my face, the delicate fish fin between eyebrows, the birds’ nests encircling each eye. In front of the mirror—hours of practice—working each muscle like a marionette. Now I can make myself look like anything at all.
The face I show the cameras is my most faithful: placid, thoughtless, empty.
I arrive downtown well before my next adjudication. To pass the time, I sit in a café, scan my calendar. Colored squares fill the screen—different adjudications around the city, documents of profiles and background information on each of my reformeds.
My eyes close for a moment, and my ears range the café—plasticore plates sliding against each other, clink of utensils. A soundscape I never could have imagined where I grew up. In the Cove, only the shush of the ocean, carts on a rocky roadway, the scrape of a tiny knife slipping into the tight mouths of oysters, occasionally slipping into the pad of my thumb, a silent gush of red falling through my hands.
Seated nearby, a man some years older than me scrolls through the endless, bright feed on his screen. I watch his fingers fling past pictures. Palm trees forking the sky. A baby held in a man’s arms like a loaf of bread. A woman sitting on artificially green grass in the high-necked, bulbous dress popular with young wives.
And then, an image unlike the others. A white building, rounded and hut-shaped, fashioned from opaque material. Against a backdrop of marshy jungle, the building glows. It makes a light all its own.
I stand from my chair. Water that had collected in the folds of my raincoat unfurls to the ground. I barely notice. My eyes, transfixed. That photo. A facility building. Not from the Meadows, but another, shrouded in overgrown foliage. Above the screen, the man suspends his fingers, engrossed in the image too.
Can’t believe it’s been well over a decade since I last saw the Glades, the photo is captioned.
“The Glades,” I speak, and the man with the screen whips his head around, eyes wide. He doesn’t know me, doesn’t know if he’s been caught.
“The Meadows,” I say, placing a hand on my chest.
His shoulders dip, relaxing.
“I haven’t met many of us,” I tell him, though of course it’s not true. By now I’ve met dozens. Hundreds.
The man scans the café for anyone who might overhear. “Not that you’d know,” he mutters.
He’s right. If we’ve made it here, we’re reformed. What happened in the facilities, what they did to us, are closely guarded secrets.
A gold band encircles his finger. For a moment, his eyes trail to my own wedding finger, bare. “They haven’t matched you yet?” he asks.
I shake my head. “They made me an adjudicator. My time’s up in a year, though.” An adjudicator’s term is two years and already I’m half-done. Then a ring will be my fate too.
“You can’t have been out long,” he says.
I pull my shoulders back, trying to appear my full eighteen years. “About a year.”
“I’ve got almost fifteen,” he says. “Mine was one of the first cohorts.” The muscles beneath his face are controlled but too tight. Hiding something. “I don’t understand reminiscing,” he says, gazing again at the screen. “I’d never go back.”
“I would,” I say, surprising myself.
He frowns. “You would?”
And I nod, an unexpected knot forming in my throat.
For them. For her.
Rose.
The night I first saw Rose, the air was dim, blushing with dusty violet, as close as it got to night in the Meadows. Just past dinnertime. The girls would be filing from the glowing walls of the dining room, having eaten their carefully portioned meals. From where I sat inside the yew tree, I could see for miles, a sea of purple flowers, hazy in the evening, stretching for what I knew was farther than a person could ever walk.
The shuttle was a slim black knife, cutting first with its glint, then with its sound. The rumble up the dirt road meant only one thing: another girl. Her hair, cut short at the sides. Her body, muscular. Stocky. She wore a shiny black raincoat, thick metal zipper laddering up the front—an alarming contrast to the thin white dresses we wore. Most of us were twelve, thirteen, fourteen when we arrived, but she was older. A dart of grief passed through me. The Meadows would strip all of it away. Her body, forced to be still, would lose its muscle, and her hair forced to grow, and that coat thrown out with the trash.
That coat. I didn’t know how it was possible but her coat, I could see, was stippled with rain. No rain in the Meadows. No snow. No weather of any kind.
This girl carried rain with her.
Two matrons met her at the door, bulky white figures with a hand hovering over her shoulders. The girl took a few paces, and paused. She turned, so even from the yew tree, I could see her face. For the first time, I had an awareness of how many muscles must live inside a human face. I could see them all, the anatomy of her.
Every girl who’d entered the Meadows wore the same face: wondrous, bright-eyed. Hands clutching acceptance letters. Minds daring to imagine a future of easy breath in these bright halls and purple fields.
Rose’s face—nothing like that. Looking like it could grip the sky and rip it in half. Looking like she wanted to. 


Chapter 2
Neon sprays of weeds and scabby rust-colored scrub covered the rockside. I picked over the basalt and peeked over the edge of our cliff where, far below, the ocean had peeled back to reveal a circus of tide pools, the violet blush of urchins, pink sea stars holding the rock like grasping hands. The ocean could sneak up on a person there, surging unexpectedly through blowholes in the pocked surface. You had to listen. You had to be always on guard.
This is the place I grew from, this dirt, this sea wind, this salted air. I didn’t look at the ocean much in those days. It felt mean, uncontrollable. Now I know about the tides that pull at it, the moon—forces the sea couldn’t possibly understand. I imagine it might’ve wanted to do something different, to stretch long and thin, to muscle inside the hidden pockets of caves and the every-color cavities of tide pools. To feel itself unfold across the midnight depths that nobody else got to touch. Perhaps it threw itself against the rocks for a reason.
The only cause strong enough to pull my eyes toward the sea was the hope of spotting June’s boat. I’d known her since we were little, back when I recognized her only by sight, the fishergirl tying ropes, smelling of ocean and guts. She sailed with her father, pulling creatures from the depths, some grown grotesque from radiation. June saved them for me. “A three-headed crab,” she’d whisper as we passed each other on market day. Or,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Young Readers Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2023
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593619633
• ISBN 13: 9780593619636
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 448
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Mayer, Paape, Voigt Kompakt Schallplatten GbR; https://www.kompakt.fm; ; Werder Str. 15-19; K�ln; 50672; Deutschland