Master class /
Material type: TextPublisher: New York : Berkley, 2020Edition: First EditionDescription: 319 pages ; 23 cmContent type:- text
- unmediated
- volume
- 9780440000839
- 0440000831
- 813/.6 23
- PS3604.A35355 M37 2020
Item type | Current library | Home library | Collection | Call number | Copy number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item holds | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Standard Loan | Coeur d'Alene Library Adult Fiction | Coeur d'Alene Library | Book | DALCHER (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610022353903 | |||
Standard Loan | Hayden Library Adult Science Fiction | Hayden Library | Book | DALCHER (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610022406503 | |||
Standard Loan | Liberty Lake Library Adult Fiction | Liberty Lake Library | Book | FIC DALCHER (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Available | 31421000651241 | ||||
Standard Loan | Wallace Library Adult Fiction | Wallace Library | Book | DALCHER.LARGE PRINT (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | 1 | Available | 50610021728410 |
Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:
From the critically-acclaimed author of the international bestseller VOX comes a suspenseful new novel that examines a disturbing near future where harsh realities follow from unreachable standards.
It's impossible to know what you will do...
Every child's potential is regularly determined by a standardized measurement: their quotient (Q). Score high enough, and attend a top tier school with a golden future. Score too low, and it's off to a federal boarding school with limited prospects afterwards. The purpose? An improved society where education costs drop, teachers focus on the more promising students, and parents are happy.
When your child is taken from you.
Elena Fairchild is a teacher at one of the state's elite schools. When her nine-year-old daughter bombs a monthly test and her Q score drops to a disastrously low level, she is immediately forced to leave her top school for a federal institution hundreds of miles away. As a teacher, Elena thought she understood the tiered educational system, but as a mother whose child is now gone, Elena's perspective is changed forever. She just wants her daughter back.
And she will do the unthinkable to make it happen.
Elena Fairchild is a teacher at one of the state's new elite schools, where children undergo routine tests for their quotient (Q). Those who don't measure up are placed in the many state boarding schools that have cropped up under a new government mandate--Elena's daughter, Freddie, is one of them. In order to be with Freddie, Elena immediately requests to transfer to the state school. To her horror, she learns that the children are receiving the bare minimum of instruction. Instead, they spend their days making handcrafted goods--valuable commodities in the age of machine-made products. What began as a shock quickly becomes a nightmare as Elena discovers the terrifying atrocities inflicted upon the students. Not only have their test scores been tampered with, but they're also unwitting subjects of experiments, one of which tests a new method of chemical sterilization. The plan? To render all adolescents with undesirable quotients infertile...and Freddie may be next in line.
Excerpt provided by Syndetics
Reviews provided by Syndetics
Library Journal Review
Shouting out again after her successful debut, Vox, a No. 1 LibraryReads pick and national best seller, Dalcher introduces us to a world where children are routinely tested for their Quotient (Q), with high Q-ers attending elite schools and the rest shoved into state institutions. When daughter Freddie doesn't test out on top, teacher Elena Fairchild transfers from an elite school to a state school to be with her. There, she's alarmed to see that the students are taught little, instead spending their time making profitable handicrafts. What's far worse, they are subject to experimentation, with a new method of chemical sterilization proposed to render low-Q students infertile.Publishers Weekly Review
In this disturbing dystopian tale set in the near future from Dalcher (Vox), the U.S. government has adopted a ranking system for pre--college age students, dividing them into groups based on a constantly monitored quotient or Q score. The brightest attend elite schools, while those whose quotients are at the low end are taken away from their parents and bused to remote state boarding schools. The ranking system expands to adults, who are given preferential treatment in store checkout lines based on their Q scores. This nightmare is the priority for federal secretary of education Madeleine Sinclair, whose first deputy, Malcolm Fairchild, is married to a teacher, Elena Fairchild, whose offhand remark to him years before during high school led to the current system: "Wouldn't it be great if all the people we hated could carry their crappy GPAs around for life?" When Elena's nine-year-old daughter is taken away to a boarding school, Elena is forced to confront the monstrous system she's been complicit in. Dalcher combines the pace and tension of a standout thriller with thought-provoking projections of the possible end result of ranking children based on test scores. Admirers of The Handmaid's Tale will be appropriately unsettled. Agent: Laura Bradford, Bradford Literary. (Apr.)Booklist Review
The author of the best-seller Vox (2018) imagines a different type of dystopian nightmare inspired by the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century. Elena Fairchild grew up resenting the pretty, popular kids who shunned her, but as time went on, she and Malcolm, whom she ended up marrying, found a way to exact their revenge by giving students privileges based on academic performance. The system they started at school has morphed into a severe national policy dictating that adults and children alike are harshly judged by their "Q" scores, which determine every aspect of their lives. Elena lives to regret the situation she helped set up when the Q score of her youngest daughter, Freddie, falls and she is sent away to a state boarding school. Malcolm, now the deputy secretary of education, refuses to help, so Elena mounts a desperate plan to get her daughter back, one that reveals the horrors suffered by those whose Q scores don't hit the mark. Dalcher's novel reads like an expanded episode of Black Mirror; it is terrifying, haunting, and cautionary.Kirkus Book Review
A woman takes on the educational system in order to save her daughter in this dystopian thriller. Elena Fairchild has two daughters--Anne, 16, who does extremely well in school, and Freddie, 9, who has intense anxiety and struggles to keep up her grades--and is married to Malcolm Fairchild, the man who helped implement a new government educational system in which each person is assigned a Q, a number based largely on intelligence that determines their place in society. Elena, a teacher at an elite school, conducts each month's Q tests with dread, watching more and more children fall through the cracks. When Freddie bombs her tests and her Q drops below 8, Elena knows the girl will be taken away to a boarding school half the country away and her family will have few opportunities to visit or even talk to her. Elena's grandmother, who grew up in Germany during the run-up to World War II, warns her that she must rescue her daughter before it's too late. With everything against her, Elena throws caution to the wind in an attempt to get Freddie back. Dalcher (Vox, 2018) is no stranger to tackling social issues in her fiction, and this time she turns her eye to eugenics. The book's examination of the way people will accept more and more small social changes until the system becomes something unrecognizable and horrific feels timely and urgent. There are moments when this message is delivered in an overly blunt way, but it's an important enough idea that the book works anyway. The world is fully realized, though it isn't clear if it's set in the present day or a near future. The writing, however, is top notch and keeps the reader guessing. An engaging parable of dangerous social change. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.Author notes provided by Syndetics
Christina Dalcher is a Linguist, Teacher, and writer, based in Northfolk, Virginia. She earned her doctorate in theoretical linguistics from Georgetown University. Her short stories and flash fiction have been published in numerous journals. Her debut novel is entitled Vox and was published in August 2018.(Bowker Author Biography)
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