SOLVED. Young adult dystopian book in a world where most people have a microchip in their head, with a female main character. Spoilers ahead. [s]

[Alec]

Just want to say first, it isn't Feed.

I read it as a teenager (around 2010, but I have no idea when it was published, just that I don't remember mobile phones being in the book) and just cannot remember what it was called, or the author, and it's driving me crazy!

It was a young adult dystopian novel. It wasn't particularly long, probably about 300 pages, and I remember that the cover was pale blue, maybe with a butterfly on the front?

SPOILERS!!!





The story was set in the future in the UK. There is just one gigantic city, and much of the rest of the country is underwater. All babies have a microchip placed into their brains to regulate their personality, but sometimes it fails, creating people who are semi-aware and people who are not influenced by it at all. There is a substance I think called funk that they take like a drug as an emergency emotion regulator. Stories and imagination are forbidden.

The protagonist is a female teen. I can't remember her actual name but I remember that her mother had intended to call her Hope. Something happened to her and she was taken away from the hospital before having the chip implanted, and raised in a small community / camp of other similar children run by a sort of resistance force in the countryside.

I also remember that everything turned out to be run by a massive computer, which used stories as a sort of baseline for how things should run. The author kept mentioning this one story as the saddest thing the protagonist had ever read, and that turned out to be the only story actually being used to regulate things. I think she ends up deleting everything except one which she found more hopeful. Might have been Pandora's box?

Thanks in advance for the help.

[Kris]

Sleepwalking by Nicola Morgan seems to match your description.

One Goodreads reviewer says, "People live in cities, which cater to their every need. They have special prescriptions, called pims and funks, which are specially adjusted to each person, so as to make them as calm as possible."

(Google search - site:www.goodreads.com "young adult" dystopian microchip drug)

[Alec]

YES!!! That's it, thank you so much. Apparently my google-fu isn't as advanced as I thought it was. That's such a relief.

[Kris]

Great! Glad you found your book, Daniel. I got lucky with Google - adding the keyword "Britain" didn't help in this case.