THE GLASS ARROW

A teenage girl raised free in the wild struggles to escape the fate of city girls—being auctioned for breeding.

Aya’s captured during a brutal attack and brought to the city, where she’s placed in a holding facility for unpurchased virgins. City girls, raised on “meal supplement pills,” aren’t as fertile as wild girls, so Aya’s a hot commodity, making it imperative that she sabotage her chances of purchase. Acting out to avoid going to auction, she is punished with solitary confinement. In solitary, she meets a Driver (odd, mute mountain people who handle horses and are viewed as a lower life form) and forms a strange friendship with him. After failed escape attempts result in stricter surveillance by the biologically enhanced Watchers, quick-thinking Aya hatches a last-minute (hilarious) plan during the auction—and it might have worked if the mayor’s son hadn’t also found it funny. Aya has just moments to be rescued by the Driver from life as property. A forced gynecological-exam scene that’s horrifying but not explicit is the most graphic sexual content, enhancing the terror of the culture’s implied, off-page rapes. The culture and world are vaguely drawn, suffering from dropped plotlines, convoluted rules and poorly defined settings. The ending neither screams sequel nor especially satisfies.

The ideas—extreme control of women and their sexuality—are more successful than the story’s execution.