ALICE IN EVERMOOR

In Huss’ YA SF novel, a teen living in a domed community connects with a family in the devastated outside world.

A large dome protects the people of Evermoor from a world that’s succumbed to a failed economy and a ravaged climate. While passage in and out of the dome was once possible, a car bomb a half-century earlier has, as far as most people know, closed off this access permanently. Seventeen-year-old Alice Monroe comes from a family of gatekeepers; she and other family members do maintenance work on the dome, which requires leaving its confines—something she has to keep secret. When her father, a struggling drug addict, collapses outside the dome, they receive help from members of the Hayes family, who live there. Alice grows close to them, especially Torrey, a sickly young man who could benefit from Evermoor’s technology. Alice, who feels trapped inside the dome, unwittingly gets hooked on EVR, an experimental virtual reality she accesses via a brain-implanted nanobot. It’s not something she can always control, slipping from the real world into a virtual one of her own design. Huss’ profound story is grounded by a remarkable cast of characters, including Alice’s cousin and fellow gatekeeper, Ren, and Torrey’s warmhearted grandmother, Genevieve, who provides a startling contrast to Alice’s rather callous grandfather. The story aptly treats Alice’s EVR link as an addiction; the only way others can pull her out of her virtual reveries is, essentially, to yell her name—much in the same way Alice tries to rouse her overdosing father. (Scenes inside the EVR feel shockingly real, providing a taste of an easier life that Alice understandably craves.) Huss’ prose depicts both virtual reality and the outside world with dynamism and sensory detail: “Our feet rake through a mix of leaves and reddish pine needles on a path of dappled light and shadow through the forest.”

A riveting dystopian tale of family and addiction.