Vox was a lot more powerful and disquieting than I expected it to be. Dalcher’s premise is simple: women are given a quota of 100 words a day, and a wrist tracker delivers an electric shock for violations. Considering that humans speak an average of 16,000 words a day, that’s a helluva cut.

I remember how impactful Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale was when I read it for the first time. Published more than thirty years ago, and Vox’s clear literary predecessor, Handmaid’s Tale is a quietly disquieting tale of misogyny taken to the extreme. It portrays a world where women are purely reproductive machines. Reading and writing are prohibited, and words are treated by its protagonist Offred as rare delicacies. So when I received an ARC of Vox in the mail, part of me was honestly expecting Handmaid’s Tale Lite. What can Dalcher’s book say that Handmaid’s Tale hasn’t already posited. More to the point, what can it tell us that we don’t already see all too often on news sites and social media?

Quite a lot, as it turns out. Whereas Atwood’s novel was contemplative and quietly simmering with its rage, Vox is a primal scream, and exactly the kind of novel we should all be paying attention to. Dalcher is not shy about calling out the problems in contemporary society. The America in her novel, where women are limited to a daily quota of 100 words (on average, humans speak 16,000 words a day), is fuelled by religious extremism, in particular Christianity. The men in her story use Bible verses to justify their actions, and people who tow the line are considered “pure.” The American president was elected into office to succeed America’s first Black president, and is mostly seen as an unintelligent bully who relies on his brother and a pastor to enact policy.

Her protagonist, Dr. Jean McClellan, remembers all too well the protests her best friend invited her to join in college. When Jean said she preferred to focus on her studies and spend time with her boyfriend, her friend accuses her of living in a bubble. In the present-day narrative, Jean’s bubble has been forcibly burst, and she regrets with all her heart not having fought back more while she still had the chance. This part of the narrative hits far too close to home for me. Like Jean, I recognize my privilege in being able to choose to not protest, and yet like Jean, I too am guilty of burying my head in the sand in the name of self-care.

There is nothing subtle about Dalcher’s prose, and perhaps, like the much more action-packed TV adaptation of Atwood’s novel, this is precisely the approach our society needs right now to shock us out of our respective bubbles.

Beyond the obvious message, Dalcher has also written an electric thriller. The quota on women’s words was imposed less than two years before the story, so Jean very much remembers how life was before the quota. The stakes are raised because she sees her six year old daughter learning to be silent, and her teenage son becoming a proponent of the “purity” movement. There are scenes where the son tells his mother what he’s come to believe, and honestly, those were really hard to read. I felt how deep the betrayal must cut for Jean, and how frustrated she must be at her inability to fight back.

I also loved the science aspect of this thriller. Before the quota was imposed, Jean was a scientist researching a cure for aphasia, which, according to aphasia.org, is “a communications disorder that impairs a person’s ability to process language, but does not affect intelligence.” When a skiing accident causes aphasia in the president’s brother, Jean and her research team are tasked to find a cure, and Jean realizes she has a rare opportunity to fight back and try to regain the freedoms that American women have lost. I loved how nerdy the fight for freedom was, and the development of this plot line kept me flipping the page.

I also like that the book acknowledged other intersecting identities. For example, an interracial couple plays a key role in the revolution, and the wife, who is Black, calls Jean out on her white privilege and points out that women of colour face much more marginalization than white women. Deaf women who sign don’t have the same quota yet, because the wrist tracker doesn’t track sign language. Jean’s son mentions that a glove version of the tracker is under development to address that, but in the meantime, a couple of the characters use sign language to communicate. These are mostly minor scenes that I wish had been explored further, but I’m glad that they were acknowledged at all.

Vox is a page turner of a thriller, and a sledgehammer of a message piece about the rights of women in today’s America. The book should come with major trigger warnings, but at the risk of spoilers, the ending is well worth the read.

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Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Bonjour Girl is a YA book about a French-Chinese girl who goes to New York to study at the Parsons School of Design and become a fashion blogger. Clementine Liu is passionate about diversity in fashion, and wants to highlight non-traditional designs on her blog. She falls in love with a hot photographer, befriends a classmate who designs clothes for people who use wheelchairs, and has to contend with a mean girl bully who sends bitchy tweets about Clementine’s blog.

I love the cover art, and I was initially attracted to this book because I love fashion and I love that the heroine is half-Chinese. I’ve also heard good things about Lafleche’s adult series J’adore.

Bonjour Girl skews to the younger end of the young adult spectrum, and possibly the higher end of the middle grade readership. Stella’s mean girl tweets about Clementine’s blog feel more thirteen year old than nineteen year old, and I was taken aback by how many of Clementine’s friends advised her to take legal action. I was also wondering how an aspiring fashion blogger needed a $5000 scholarship to start her blog — at nineteen and with WordPress and Tumblr around, wouldn’t she have had one already, even if it’s super unpolished? Clementine is also praised by her aunt for having a social conscience because she wants to return the scholarship money after being wealth-shamed by her gay best friend Jake, but honestly Jake was a jerk for doing that. I thought Clementine overreacted, and I especially had hoped her aunt would at least give her a reality check.

Still, I loved the descriptions of the clothes, and the shopping trips Clementine and Jake go on. I also love the glamour and drama around Clementine’s personal life — I think I’d react a lot like Jake and fangirl about Clementine having a mom who’s an opera singer and a grandmother who was a muse for a famous French designer. I also really enjoyed the parts about the various student projects, which all sound really fun, and the misadventure over Jake’s collection.

The story as a whole was a quick, fun read, and I would recommend it to younger readers (pre-teen / early teens). It reminds me somewhat of the Pippa Greene series by Chantel Guertin, which is also about a teenager pursuing her artistic dreams (see my review of Book 1 and Book 2).

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Thank you to Dundurn Press for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I should preface this review by admitting that, with everything going on today in the US around undocumented immigrants at risk of deportation and refugees seeking asylum being separated from their children at the border, I’m already predisposed to be wary when encountering a book about human trafficking, particularly when the story itself consistently uses the term “illegal immigration” and is a high-energy adventure-at-seas tale.

As an adventure story, Stowaway reminds me somewhat of the action-packed scenes of Hardy Boys or Jonny Quest, with each chapter revealing a new twist or hurdle to be tackled. Pam Withers is a talented writer, and the story is high octane and exciting. While the hero and his friends get into one scrape or another, we know a bit of ingenuity and courage will get them out of trouble eventually. It’s a fun ride, and I think children interested in an adventure story will enjoy reading this.

The book is about a Canadian teen, Owen, who stows away on a boat for kicks, and unwittingly stumbles on a people smuggling operation: the captain and his first mate Arturo are transporting a group of private school boys from Guatemala into Canada. The captain decides Owen knows too much to let him go, but Owen rallies Arturo and the other boys to work together to free themselves from the captain.

Some things in the story did make me uncomfortable. First, Owen was really excited in the beginning to help his Coast Guard friends deal with illegal immigration. About halfway through the story, it’s made explicit that the Coast Guard’s target is really people like the captain, who take payment from the boys’ parents but don’t actually get the boys safely into Canada. (In this story, the captain sends the boys to labour camp unless the parents pay more money, and then ends up trying to kill them.) The problem is, it’s no longer as easy to take for granted, as Owen does, that people in authority have these boys’ welfare in mind. While I’m sure the author intended Owen and the Coast Guard’s motives to be mostly about protecting immigrants from unscrupulous people like the captain, I also couldn’t help but feel like Owen’s glee also had to do with protecting Canada’s borders from the boys themselves, and that turned me off.

I was also wary about the idea of Owen as a Canadian being the one to save the Guatemalan boys, mostly because I’m a bit tired of the white saviour trope. In fairness to Withers, the Guatemalan first mate Arturo has just as much of a narrative voice as Owen (they alternate chapters) and turns out to be just as much a hero as Owen is. Still, Owen was the one mostly driving the heroic actions, and convincing Arturo and the other Guatemalan boys to get on-board, and I’m kinda meh about that.

There also seemed a very clear-cut dichotomy between Guatemala as impoverished and filled with fear and violence, and Canada as the land of hope and opportunity. To be fair, there’s a valid reason the boys’ families wanted them to immigrate in the first place, but all the boys kept talking about was how bad it was in Guatemala and how much better it’ll be in Canada, and I couldn’t help wishing the portrayal of Guatemala was more nuanced. Even if they went to Canada to escape bad conditions in Guatemala, isn’t there anything they miss about their old lives and their country of origin?

Those are things that detracted from my personal enjoyment of the book, but overall, the book was a strong adventure story. There were a lot of twists and turns and feats of daring, and Withers is a strong writer who keeps the action on high the entire time. There’s also a nice emotional subplot about Owen’s brother that fuels his desire to help the boys on the boat, and I love the way that subplot played out.

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Thank you to Dundurn Press for an advance reading copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.