FUTURA

A group of high school students face burgeoning authoritarianism in Laser’s future-set novel.

The story takes place in 2045, which looks much like our present, aside from updated technology and a political climate that resembles that of the 2020s United States but extrapolates what effect an additional two decades of ideological division might have. In the shadow of encroaching neo-fascism, the students at Ocean Park High in coastal New Jersey still live through familiar adolescent dramas. Bob is the new kid, more conservative than his classmates but with an open, inquisitive mind; Kristi, soon to be a full-fledged activist, rails against the indignities being done to the Constitution. Oliver and Fuzzy are the class clowns and resident videographers who work at a store with Elora Shalom, a Chinese American girl whose physician mother is in the throes of a mental health crisis. Then there’s lonely Danai, a somewhat recent arrival from Africa who’s ashamed to tell her classmates that she makes ends meet by cleaning houses with her mother and contends daily with the realities of being an undocumented immigrant. Finally, there’s Cardo, the school’s resident heartthrob, who’s doing some not-so-secret business of his own dealing underground apps to classmates while pining for Elora, the one girl he can’t get to notice him. If these characters, who feel comfortingly familiar, remind readers of high school archetypes, that’s because they are; but while Laser hasn’t reinvented the wheel here, all of these teenagers’ personalities are drawn with enough individuation to allow them to rise above mere type. (“Danai laughed, until she saw that her mother was crying. She worried that her mother would never forgive her for laughing so soon after her father had died.”) Political dystopia is a common element in today’s literary landscape, but Laser takes time to bring real pathos to his characters rather than treating them as pawns deployed for satirical or political aims. The result is a narrative that is both engaging and memorable.

A deeply felt novel whose characters will feel familiar and fresh all at once.