Review: Veracity by Laura Bynum

Veracity by Laura Bynum

Buy It Now: on Amazon.com

Description: Harper Adams was six years old in 2012 when an act of viral terrorism wiped out one-half of the country’s population. Out of the ashes rose a new government, the Confederation of the Willing, dedicated to maintaining order at any cost. The populace is controlled via government-sanctioned sex and drugs, a brutal police force known as the Blue Coats, and a device called the slate, a mandatory implant that monitors every word a person speaks. To utter a Red-Listed, forbidden word is to risk physical punishment or even death.

But there are those who resist. Guided by the fabled “Book of Noah,” they are determined to shake the people from their apathy and ignorance, and are prepared to start a war in the name of freedom. The newest member of this resistance is Harper — a woman driven by memories of a daughter lost, a daughter whose very name was erased by the Red List. And she possesses a power that could make her the underground warriors’ ultimate weapon — or the instrument of their destruction.

In the tradition of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Laura Bynum has written an astonishing debut novel about a chilling, all-too-plausible future in which speech is a weapon and security comes at the highest price of all.

This review is based on a free, review copy received from the publisher.

TDF Pamela’s Review: Bynum constructs a frightening dystopia in Veracity, but the novel is unfortunately held up by pacing problems in the first half. The worldbuilding and the characters are very solid, but the promising concept is hindered by an unfortunately tidy ending that just didn’t seem to fit the mood of the rest of the book.

There will be VERY VAGUE SPOILERS in this review! Be forewarned! I will be as vague as I possibly can be, but I have to talk about the ending and why it didn’t work for me.

The world itself is very well constructed. I’m not the biggest reader of dystopian novels; heck, I’ve somehow managed to nearly make it through literature grad school without having read 1984. But I definitely appreciate the genre for its fatalistic qualities; American popular culture so often hinges upon the happy ending, so it’s refreshing to come across a book like Lois Lowry’s The Giver, which relies heavily on ambiguity. Bynum’s world is set not too far in the future, in an America that’s become a surveillance-controlled totalitarianism, where the irreplaceable President and his ministers control the people’s lives down to the words they’re allowed to say. Language has become tightly controlled, and if someone says a bad enough red listed word, they’re immediately killed by their slates, devices embedded in their necks that monitor everything they do.

The best dystopias are ones that are ultimately believable, and this one almost hits the height of believability. I will admit that I often felt skeptical about the viability of American culture going from what it is today to the totalitarian state in which Veracity is set, but as the story progresses, Bynum explains more and more of what went wrong, from a deadly plague to government intervention to ensure the safety and survival of those young enough to be molded into the new regime. One of the most terrifying aspects of Bynum’s world is the Blue Coats, the police of the Confederation of the Willing (I couldn’t help thinking of the Hands of Blue from Joss Whedon’s Firefly). They operate with codes: series of numbers that represent punishments that they are authorized to immediately carry out. The most horrifying thing about the Blue Coats is that they’re encouraged to torture and rape, and the main character is so frighteningly resigned to the idea that she will be raped that it left me feeling incredibly unsettled.

Harper Adams, the protagonist, is for the most part a sympathetic and believable character. She was born before the Pandemic that wiped out America’s population, and so she retains some memories of what life was like before the Confederation came into being. This, along with her love for her daughter, is what spurs her to try to break her slate and escape to find the rebellion that hides outside of the Confederation’s view. Harper is also a sentient, meaning she can see auras, find people psychically, and travel outside of her body. This adds an intriguingly fantastic quality to the novel that definitely adds to my interest in it.

However, the novel is definitely held up by pacing problems in the first half. The story jumps around in time, from the present day to Harper’s adolescence and childhood to a few months before the main events of the novel. This definitely has the potential to be an evocative plot device, but unfortunately it just frustrated me. Some of the dates (the present and the events of a few months prior) are very close together, and it was occasionally confusing. I kept having to flip back to the chapter page to see exactly what I was reading again. This slowed me up, and was ultimately frustrating.

Enjoyable read, if you can persevere through the first hundred pages or so. If you want to read my thoughts on the ending, click the “More” link or scroll below my rating. If you don’t, close your eyes and hum to yourself while you scroll past the rest of this entry. ;)

Rating:

VAGUE SPOILERS BELOW! Do not read below this if you do not want to read anything like a spoiler!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
(highlight to read spoilers)
The ending was also somewhat disappointing for me. I won’t give any details, but it was way too tidy for me. This is a problem with dystopian novels for me: the ending is either depressingly ambiguous, or it is way too Pollyanna in that everything bad is wiped neatly away. Veracity hovers a bit too close to the Pollyanna end of that spectrum for my comfort, and I was left feeling like it was just too easy an ending.