BRIGHT SHINING WORLD

An itinerant teen faces down a megacorporation’s metaphysical machinations.

Swiller’s YA debut opens with acerbic narrator Wallace Cole en route from Kentucky to upstate New York. Since his mother died, his father’s job has taken them to 22 states, and he’s bounced through 14 high schools. Never mind that Wallace isn’t exactly sure what his father does—apparently he’s some sort of plant fixer for Jackduke, the country’s second largest energy company. Wallace arrives in the Finger Lakes town of North Homer, where high school students are succumbing to bouts of contagious hysteria. All the same, stakes escalate quickly and unevenly. Clichés abound: He meshes with misfits and beefs with a reactionary meathead. Wallace also falls for the brainy, gorgeous, high-achieving, inexplicably receptive homecoming queen, a turn of events that feels unearned. Mumbled explanations and illogical leaps hamstring the plot as Wallace suddenly discovers a grand conspiracy to destroy—well, call it what you will—the soul, spirit, human essence. The resulting text—too dense for a thriller and too anemic for science fiction—seems unsure of itself. Syntactical rollicks between utter despair and ostensible sincerity prevent tone from aligning with diction. Is this a sweeping social satire? Analogy for a generation’s righteous angst? Derivative bildungsroman? Amid a world on fire reduced to a smolder, who’s to say? All characters are assumed White.

A high concept shakily executed.