Meri Beckley lives in a world without lies. When she turns on the news, she hears only the facts. When she swipes the pages of her online textbooks, she reads only the truth. When she looks at the peaceful Chicago streets, she feels the pride everyone in the country feels about the era of unprecedented hope and prosperity over which the government presides.

But when Meri’s mother is killed, Meri suddenly has questions that no one else seems to be asking. And when she tries to uncover her mother’s state of mind in her last weeks, she finds herself drawn into a secret world full of facts she’s never heard and a history she didn’t know existed.

Suddenly, Meri is faced with a choice between accepting the “truth” she has been taught or embracing a world the government doesn’t want anyone to see—a world where words have the power to change the course of a country, and the wrong word can get Meri killed.

Thanks so much to Edelweiss for this ARC! When I was looking through their selection of eARCs, this cover stood out to me. I clicked it, and the first thing my eyes laid upon was the comparison between it to Scythe, which is my favorite dystopian novel. I instantly clicked Request, knowing that I would love it. I’m happy to say that I was able to verify that fact as I finished it today!

We are shown a world much different from our own via Chicago some decades from now. Crime has been obliterated. Homelessness is not an issue. Paper has become obsolete as there was a fight to recycle and keep the planet clean. This is the world that Merriel has grown up in. She has recently lost her mother and is struggling to keep her father from drinking himself to death, but otherwise her existence has been a fairly happy one. Unfortunately, things are not as they seem. While trying to solve the puzzle of the painting that her mom left unfinished after she had her accident, Meri stumbles upon a mystery.

A piece of paper is handed to her with a word she has never heard before on it. When she tries to look it up, there are no articles, but weirder still– an alarm sounds and people start acting strangely. She decides to get to the bottom of the word out of curiosity, but finds something she never expected. She meets people who knew her mother, and slowly uncovers their true goals. Her mind spins as she starts to question everything she never knew to question before; history books, government, even her own friends and family. These are things that seem like common sense to us, but as the book shows how this trust was fraudulently gained and people reigned in like derby horses, it was more and more clear to me that this was a future that could horribly but realistically happen.

The state that we are in now as a country is a terrifying one. We are divided, and there are forces on both sides trying to make a change for ‘the common good’. It’s scary to think of the lengths that the people we put in charge might go to continue to keep that place of power. I think this series is going to be exceptionally eye-opening, and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.

Meri’s courage and loyalty is something I aspire to, and I hope that I can make her proud by remembering that my words have power, and that I need to use them wisely, and to always keep asking questions, because we can’t become complacent. We just can’t.

5/5 stars