Goodhouse

A bighearted dystopian novel about the corrosive effects of fear and the redemptive power of loveWith soaring literary prose and the tense pacing of a thriller, the first-time novelist Peyton Marshall imagines a grim and startling future. At the end of the twenty-first century—in a transformed America—the families of convicted felons are tested for a set of genetic markers. Boys who test positive become compulsory wards of the state—removed from their homes and raised on Goodhouse campuses, where they learn to reform their darkest thoughts and impulses. Goodhouse is a feral place—part prison, part boarding school—and now a radical religious group, the Holy Redeemer's Church of Purity, has begun to target these schools for attack, with purifying fire. We see all this through the eyes of James, a transfer student who watched the radicals set fire to his old Goodhouse and everyone he'd ever known. In addition to entering a new...