THE MEADOWS

In a pristine, unchanging meadowland, a select group of young people learn to be perfect wives and mothers in a post–climate-disaster society on the rebuild.

Eleanor long dreamed of attending one of the handful of idyllic state-run schools for the best and brightest. When she arrived at the Meadows as a young teen, leaving behind her (maybe more than) best friend, June, she quickly began to suspect that she’d been sent there for reasons other than her academic record. Classes taught ladylike comportment and homemaking rather than science or literature, and students were encouraged to scrub themselves of any impulses that might lead them away from the heteronormative roles “nature intended.” Now 18, Eleanor is an adjudicator, responsible for monitoring former classmates. Oakes crafts the book with strong cues from adult speculative fiction classics: Both Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale are evident inspirations. The cast represents a variety of racial, gender, and sexual identities. The timeline hops between past and present, the tension at a constant simmer and a new revelation always around the corner. The book is cogent and incisive in its remarks on our present world: Surveillance culture, reproductive coercion, and anti-queer bigotry are all heightened to their very possible conclusions. Eleanor reads white; June is biracial with a white father and a late mother who had “amber” skin and came from an island that succumbed to climate change.

Timely and gripping.