Seventeen-year-old Charlie Davis, a white girl living on the margins, thinks she has little reason to live: her father drowned himself her bereft and abusive mother kicked her out her best friend, Ellis, is nearly brain dead after cutting too deeply and she's gone through unspeakable experiences living on the street.

Slyly humorous, starkly thought-provoking, passionate, and compassionate-and impeccably written to boot: not to be missed.Īfter surviving a suicide attempt, a fragile teen isn't sure she can endure without cutting herself. Bow’s writing never falters, from the vivid descriptions of the Precepture goats to the ways in which her characters must grapple with impossible decisions, and she is equally at home with violence and first kisses. The boy (Elián) is not Greta’s love interest (Princess Xie is), and anyway the love story is only a piece of a much larger story about love and war, forms of power, and the question of what is right when there is no good answer, all played out on a small and personal stage. Talis (whose voice lends a sharp, outsize, and very dark humor to his every word and scene) may not be a bad supreme ruler.

When war claims classmate Sidney and his replacement appears in chains, obedient Greta finds herself questioning everything.

Greta, Crown Princess of the Pan Polar Confederacy, is one of those Children of Peace. Should a government declare war, its heir, raised in a U.N.– (and Talis-) controlled Precepture, a monasterylike enclave, dies. A game that will end up killing them both-unless she can find a way to break all the rules.Once there was war, until an artificial intelligence named Talis took over the world.įour hundred years later, Talis still rules he has made the world peaceful, but the price is the blood of children. And he opens Greta’s eyes to the brutality of the system they live under-and to her own power.Īs Greta and Elián watch their nations tip closer to war, Greta becomes a target in a new kind of game. Elián is a boy who refuses to play by the rules, a boy who defies everything Greta has ever been taught. But everything changes when a new hostage arrives. Like them, she is prepared to die with dignity, if she must. Like them, she is taught to obey the machines that control their lives. Until then she lives in the Precepture school with the daughters and sons of the world’s leaders. Greta will be free if she can survive until her eighteenth birthday. This is how the game is played: if you want to rule, you must give one of your children as a hostage. Greta is a duchess and crown princess-and a hostage to peace.

The Scorpion Rules by Erin Bow