Braintown

by Laura Hernandez

a YA book with sci-fi elements. The book is set in 2060 and is told from the point of view of Alice Garcia, an iconoclastic teenager who wakes up on her seventeenth birthday, questioning, for the first time, everything about the town she’s lived in her entire her boy-crazy friends; her teachers’ propagandist curriculum; the pressure her parents put on her to both look a certain way and obsess about her looks; the militant generals who make her skin crawl and the feared King Manu, whose laws; machines and followers make the women of Braintown subservient to the patriarchal order. Alice is launched on an amazing journey of self-realization, in which she learns about the transformative role she’s destined to play in Braintown, and the truth about her own identity and exceptional abilities.

150 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 6, 2019

Reviews

[Veronica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Building on the Alice in Wonderland framework, Laura Hernandez creates a dystopian world ruled by a dictator and where girls are raised, no bred, to be trophy wives. Alice immediately does not fit in to her world and you are left to wonder how she has survived this long. She speaks her mind and as most teen feminist characters gets herself in trouble. Except in Braintown this can lead to death. After a tragic accident in a plastic surgery machine (a press of a button gives the teens dimensions that would topple even Barbie), Alice stumbles upon a path that changes her life.

A mix of Alice in Wonderland, The Matrix, and a Gender and Women's Studies class, Braintown works as a YA. But it is too heavy with Alice's feminist awakening for someone who has studied the field. Some YA novels are for adults, this is definitely for teens who are new to feminist thought.

The story was uneven and I felt the conclusion was a bit rushed, but the journey was worth it.