At the time of the collapse of the tyrannical surveillance state known as the Delegation, Sonya Kantor is just about old enough to considered an adult, and so is packed off to the Aperture, a prison colony for the Delegation’s most loyal and vital supporters. It’s been a decade that Sonya has been imprisoned alongside her parent’s friends, making herself useful to that micro-society as the youngest person there, and learning skills outside the use of her Insight, the ocular device the Delegation implanted in each person’s eye—ostensibly as next gen electronic communication, but mainly to maintain control over the population of the Seattle-Portland megalopolis.
One ordinary enough day, Sonya receives a visit from someone she knew well in her past life, who makes her an offer on behalf of the Triumvirate, the current government. If Sonya can find a missing teenager who has somehow remained hidden from the state for the last decade, she can have her freedom.
Poster Girl is the latest novel from the bestselling writer of the Divergent series, Veronica Roth. Fans of the writer who are looking for a similar sort of dystopian YA fiction may be disappointed, because Poster Girl is not set in a dystopia; it’s set after the fall of one. Sonya isn’t a rebel trying to bring down a tyrannical government; in fact, she was the literal poster child for that system, completely indoctrinated by the Delegation. Now, with the chance to possibly live a life outside of the Aperture, Sonya has to navigate the replacement world and the Triumvirate, the new government claiming to be as free as the Delegation was not.
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Poster Girl
She finds herself questioning the current system, comparing constantly to the previous one, uncertain now, as to how she should feel about either. The girl Sonya is attempting to find was a secret, second child, illegal under Delegation laws, and taken away from her parents by force. Sonya is tasked with reuniting the girl with her family, and though she feels at first that she has been set up for failure—that her famous face, recognisable from Delegation propaganda posters, will hinder her efforts in the outside world—she soon finds herself caught up in an elaborate web of intrigue, deceit and danger. Slowly, Sonya learns more about the depth of her family’s involvement with the previous government’s dark secrets, and herself.
And while people on the outside live free lives without the control of the Delegation now, Sonya remains a prisoner. At the end of each day, she is forced to return to the gated prison compound, to now question everything she once held true. The prisoners have been forced to keep their Insights, though of course they no longer work as they did in the time of the Delegation. Instead they are constantly accessible surveillance tools for the Triumvirate government, who are able to watch through the prisoners own eyes. That in itself could be punishment enough—knowing that strangers can see what you see with the literal flip of a switch, with no consent needed. Sonya has to live with this, and with the knowledge that when living under the Delegation, when this was still the case, it had somehow not worried her before. How easily do we give up power and freedom for convenience? How hard is it, then, to take it back when we become more aware of what has been done?
“The Insight wasn’t some aberration or anomaly,” says one of the characters Sonya meets in the city during her search, “it is the symptom of a disease that still infects our population—the desire to make everything easy, to sacrifice autonomy and privacy for convenience. That’s what technology is, […] a concession to laziness and the devaluing of human effort.”
None of this is, of course, new to us, with our constant connectivity and tracking via mobile phones and smart devices. The world of Poster Girl is an easily imagined and disturbingly familiar one, both in the time of the Delegation, and after. Roth is never preachy or pedantic, but she makes her point clear, whether it be about state surveillance, or about living with regret, or making amends.
This is a very well paced, clearly thought out narrative that is highly readable, both in style and in length. It’s polished to motion picture perfection: detailed with clear sharp prose in a particularly visual sense, that makes it very easy to see it translate well on the screen—to the point where Roth often employs very recognisable classic movie script beats in her narrative, given this is ultimately a hero’s journey. It’s a well written, well paced noir thriller, with the titular poster girl as the young, pretty version of the hardboiled, embittered detective in a noir narrative, a narrative that holds your attention easily, even with (or perhaps because of) its carefully plotted twists and turns.
Poster Girl is published by William Morrow.
Read an excerpt here.
Mahvesh loves dystopian fiction and appropriately lives in Karachi, Pakistan. She writes about stories when not wasting much too much time on Twitter.
