The Resisters: A novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

Product Description
The provocative, moving, and paradoxically buoyant story of one family struggling to maintain their humanity in circumstances that threaten their every value.
The time: not so long from now. The place: AutoAmerica, a country surveilled by one “Aunt Nettie,” a Big Brother that is part artificial intelligence, part internet, and oddly human—even funny. The people: divided. The “angelfair” Netted have jobs and, what with the country half under water, literally occupy the high ground. The Surplus live on swampland if they’re lucky, on water if they’re not.
The story: To a Surplus couple—he once a professor, she still a lawyer—is born a girl, Gwen, with a golden arm. Her teens find her happily playing in an underground baseball league, but when AutoAmerica faces ChinRussia in the Olympics, Gwen finds herself in dangerous territory, playing ball with the Netted even as her mother battles this apartheid-like society in court.
Review
“Intricately imagined . . .
The Resisters is a book that grows directly out of the soil of our current political moment.”
—
The New York Times Book Review
“The magic of [
The Resisters] is that, amid a dark and cautionary tale, there’s a story also filled with electricity and humor—and baseball. . . . [A] great gift.”
—
The Washington Post
“Sweeping, subversive. . . . Brilliant. . . . [
The Resisters] finds in baseball a compelling metaphor for a country that will always have something to prove.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“A dystopia so chillingly plausible that an entire review could be spent simply describing its components. . . . Marvelous.”
—The Boston Globe
“[An] inspired vision. . . . In
The Resisters, [Jen] offers hope that, after a long, misbegotten seventh-inning stretch, Americans of the near future will be eager to once again play ball and take up the hard work of participatory democracy.”
—NPR
“Jen writes electric, entertaining sentences. . . . In sport, Jen finds a metaphor for what it is to be human.”
—Bookforum
“An entertaining ride in a new yet familiar world. . . . Empowering.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Triumphantly original . . . a
1984 for our time. . . . Don’t dare call this fantasy or science fiction. This is a world all too terrifying, dangerous and real.”
—Newsday
“Sweeping, subversive. . . . Brilliant. . . . As Jen reveals how America became AutoAmerica, one seemingly tiny but cumulatively fatal development at a time, she finds in baseball a compelling metaphor for a country that will always have something to prove.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Jen masterfully builds her dystopian world, depicting how easily such a change can creep over a populace too ready to trade liberty for convenience . . . At heart, a story about love, family, and the core values of freedom and independence.”
—Nashville Scene
“Clever . . . So meaningful, and so disquieting . . .
The Resisters raises a host of provocative questions about what a ruthless combination of omnipresent technology and economic inequality might look like. George Orwell would be proud. And scared.”
—Shelf Awareness
“Astutely realized and unnervingly possible . . . Jen masterfully entwines shrewd mischief, knowing compassion, and profound social critique in a suspenseful tale encompassing baseball ardor, family love, newly insidious forms of racism and tyranny, and a wily and righteous resistance movement.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“A dire tale of nonconformity in a world gone mad.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
“Subtle dystopian fiction . . . beautifully crafted and slyly unsettling. . . . The juxtaposition of America’s pastime and the AI-enabled surveillance state Jen presents here is brilliant.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“[A] shrewd and provocative near-future novel. . . . [Jen’s] intelligence and control shine through in a chilling portrait of the casual acceptance of totalitarianism.”
—Publishers Weekly
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The Resisters