Veronica Roth is the New York Times bestselling author of Chosen Ones, the short story collection The End and Other Beginnings, the Divergent series, and the Carve the Mark duology. She was also the guest editor of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021. She lives in Chicago.
For decades, everyone in the Seattle-Portland megalopolis lived under constant surveillance in the form of the Insight, an ocular implant that tracked every word and every action, rewarding or punishing according to the rigid moral code set forth by the Delegation. Then there was a revolution. The Delegation fell. Its most valuable members were locked in the Aperture, a prison on the outskirts of the city. And everyone else, now free from the Insight's monitoring, went on with their lives. Sonya, former poster girl for the Delegation, has been imprisoned for ten years when an old enemy comes to her with a deal: find a missing girl who was stolen from her parents by the old regime, and earn her freedom. The path Sonya takes to find the child will lead her through an unfamiliar, corrupt post-Delegation world where she finds herself digging deeper into the past—and her family's dark secrets—than she ever wanted to. With razor-sharp prose and insights, Poster Girl is a haunting dystopian mystery that explores the ever expanding role of surveillance on society.
I honestly probably haven't read any dystopian novels since I last read Divergent in 2015, and I didn't realize how much I enjoyed these world until picking up Poster Girl. I liked the balance of Sonya's story: we are following her quest to freedom and the mystery of the impossible task she is assigned to earn that freedom, while also investigating important, relevant questions of government surveillance, grief, and familial responsibility. Roth is able to balance all of these themes masterfully, which is a feat for a standalone novel where she also has to build the world. Overall, I was quite satisfied with how all the loose ends were tied up and the amount of time spent on all of the novel's themes.
As far as the world building goes, Roth essentially builds two versions of the same world. The first is the world of Sonya's childhood, when the Delegation and DesCoins reigned. The world that Sonya currently inhabits, under the Triumvirate, is foreign to her because of her years of captivity, and the world of her childhood still has power over her. Watching Sonya interact with the Triumvirate world while still being influenced by the Delegation creates an interesting commentary on childhood, consciousness, memory, and so much more. I enjoyed how just simply world building, not just character development, could help bring in thematic elements.
If I were to describe this novel in one world, it would be grief. A lot of Sonya's journey to freedom is working through the grief over her family and her past choices. While her family died ten years prior, the task she has been given brings that moment rushing back, and interacting with the new world that they did not see also brings that loss into sharp focus. For this reason, I think some people might find the read a bit slower, or not as exciting or adventurous as other dystopian novels, but I quite preferred this pace, and getting to see Sonya work through familiar emotions in a world not quite our own.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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