So, we did a "Blackout Bingo" challenge for the beginning of the school year. I wish more kids had participated, but my clerk and I enjoyed it. I needed a dystopian, learning that not much dystopian is being written lately! I saw this book on a nominated list for Lone Star 2024 and knew I had a winner to read! I will say that the cover is too "kid" looking. It's hard to get middle school kids to read books that looks like they're for elementary students exclusively. Alas.

Yolanda Ciceron possesses a sharp, scientific and technical brain. She lives in a time after society has fallen apart. Many parts of the country don't have any connectivity. and life is harsh She considers herself lucky that she attends classes online and does really well. She's pretty much a genius and dreams of being a neuro doctor who puts implants into people's brains. She lives in the harsh environment with her sister because their parents were exiled. They try to grow strawberries, but nothing grows anymore. Yolanda dreams of leaving their little farm and moving to the most advanced town, Silo. To keep safe, everyone carries a device that must be with them at all times. Yolanda doesn't mind at all, using her device for everything, while others feel encroached upon. Yolanda wants to impress the mayor in order to advance, leaving behind all of the hardships. Her sister, on the other hand, holds Yolanda back.

The catalyst for the plot is when Yolanda registers for a class and discovers there's no money. Her sister never told her how bad their situation had become. Yolanda decides to get a scholarship, but her sister warns her not to accept it without reading the fine print. About the same time, Yolanda's best friend disappears. Also, while the girls are in town, a strange scene happens with a citizen. Yolanda begins to wonder if she's been blinded to the true society. Trying to save herself and her sister, Yolanda grasps on to an idea her sister put in her head. Perhaps their grandmother left secrets for them. Once Yolanda starts down this road of discovery, everything changes. ( )

Yolanda lives with her older sister Cami on their family's starwberry farm in the Valley, outside the town of Silo, which was rebuilt and connected with tech salvaged from before the collapse. Yoly's goal in life is to become a neurolink surgeon and live in Silo, but Cami is stubbornly attached to their farm, even though the pollinator drones don't work and their strawberries are white and sour. Cami has her reasons to distrust Mayor Blackburn and all that he and Silo represent, however - although Yolanda doesn't know this until she gets into debt, accepting a scholarship for school. To save Yoly from having to go on Retreat to pay her debt, the sisters work together to decode their Abuelita's research on bees; they discover a secret hive, and think they can get Yoly out of debt by selling the honey to Hortensia Blackburn. But time is running out, and Yoly begins to understand the big picture: that the Blackburns and Silo aren't working to help everyone in the Valley, but rather to keep them desperate and in debt, and it's time to bring the whole system down.

Although there is a lot to like here, something about this book just didn't work for me. I started in audio and finished in print, and felt impatient for the first part of the book, where it seemed so obvious that Yolanda's insistence that she knew best was going to get her in trouble, not just with her sister, but with Mayor Blackburn. The themes of inequality, respecting nature, and using technology in service of all people, not just some, are good ones, but quite obvious. Yoly reminded me a bit of Katniss Everdeen in The Hungre Games, but less savvy and more naive, less cynical and more optimistic.

Quotes

"Silence is not protection....It's just another form of control." (230)

...it was never about what was wrong. It was about what we needed to fix to make things right. The past can teach us a lot about what we decide to do with our present. (286) ( )