City of Beasts
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A teenage girl living in a post-nuclear town embarks on a quest to save her brother from the other side of a divided world in this dystopian adventure novel for fans of Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now. For seventeen years, fees have lived separate from beasts. The division of the sexes has kept their world peaceful. Glori Rhodes is like most other fees her age. She adores her neighborhood's abandoned Costco, can bench her body weight, and she knew twenty-seven beast counterattack moves by the time she was seven. She has never questioned the separation of the sexes or the rules that keep her post-nuclear hometown safe. But when her mother secretly gives birth to a baby beast, Glori grows to love the child and can't help wondering: What really is the difference between us and them? When her brother, at the age of five, is snatched in a vicious raid, Glori and her best friend, Su, do the unthinkable -- covertly infiltrate the City of Beasts to get him back. What's meant to be a smash-and-grab job quickly becomes the adventure of a lifetime as the fees team up with a fast-talking, T-shirt cannon-wielding beast named Sway, and Glori starts to see that there's more to males, and her own history, than she's been taught.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After a nuclear event leaves the world in ruins, the women ("fees") of Buffalo gather for safety and form a women's-only community on an isolated island. Glori, granddaughter of the community's founder, is part of the last generation of children born before radiation caused widespread sterility. Though she has been raised to fear and protect herself against the male "beasts" across the water, she has a soft spot for her little brother, Twofer, born under mysterious circumstances and kept a secret. When the beasts take him, she sets off to bring him back, encountering some men who are just as bad as she expected. But she also finds kindness and generosity, especially from Sway, the boy who becomes her guide to the world outside her island, and together they discover that people of all genders are capable of monstrous acts as well as comfort and kindness. As Glori and Sway grow closer, they begin to imagine their city united, but first they'll have to foil a plot to kill every beast in Buffalo. A page-turning dystopian novel that explores the divisions that differences can engender and the things that can, sometimes, mend them. Ages 14 up.