The Meadows

Chapter 1
I glance up at the eye, a shining black bead atop an old telephone pole. I walk briskly through pelting droplets, head bent. A cascade of water skims off my hood.
I show my face again to the bead on the awning of a shopping center, and again to one on the bus shelter where people huddle like cattle.
Each eye, memorized.
Not to see them. For them to see me.
My face.
I ve become very familiar with it since I moved to the city. When I arrived a year ago, I found a book about the muscular system, fallen behind the desk bolted to the wall in my room. The apartment block where I live was a girls college dormitory once. The book must ve slipped back there, forgotten by some long-ago student when women could still attend universities.
I hid it beneath my mattress, memorized the meaty striations bisecting my face, the delicate fish fin between eyebrows, the birds nests encircling each eye. In front of the mirror hours of practice working each muscle like a marionette. Now I can make myself look like anything at all.
The face I show the cameras is my most faithful: placid, thoughtless, empty.
I arrive downtown well before my next adjudication. To pass the time, I sit in a café, scan my calendar. Colored squares fill the screen different adjudications around the city, documents of profiles and background information on each of my reformeds.
My eyes close for a moment, and my ears range the café plasticore plates sliding against each other, clink of utensils. A soundscape I never could have imagined where I grew up. In the Cove, only the shush of the ocean, carts on a rocky roadway, the scrape of a tiny knife slipping into the tight mouths of oysters, occasionally slipping into the pad of my thumb, a silent gush of red falling through my hands.
Seated nearby, a man some years older than me scrolls through the endless, bright feed on his screen. I watch his fingers fling past pictures. Palm trees forking the sky. A baby held in a man s arms like a loaf of

Stephanie Oakes is the author of The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly, which was a Morris Award finalist and a Golden Kite Honor book, and The Arsonist, which won the Washington State Book Award and was an ALA/YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults pick. An elementary school librarian, Stephanie lives in Spokane, Washington with her wife and family.
 

  

"This beautiful and important book is dystopian YA at its finest, and its themes of queer resilience and community will resonate for many years to come."  BCCB (starred review)

[One of] the best YA novels hitting shelves . . . More necessary and timely than ever. This story of state-run schools in a post-climate disaster world that teach select young women to be perfect wives and mothers to help repopulate society doesn t feel as alien or far away as it once might have. Timely and thoughtful.   Paste Magazine

In the style of Kazuo Ishiguro, details [are] dabbled out in tiny, delicious morsels and flashbacks . . . The writing is painterly, yet tight; the book ties up every detail . . . A haunting dystopian amalgamation for the 21st century. Superlative, powerful, and timely. School Library Journal (starred review)

"Oakes employs evocative prose and worldbuilding shot through with equal parts melancholy and hope to craft an intelligent dystopian tale that proves a biting interpretation of contemporary issues surrounding conversion therapy, homophobia, misogyny, and racism."  Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The Meadows is built with extraordinary parts stunning language, complex characters, and the most exquisite heart. It s a stop-you-in-your-tracks book, a reach-inside-and-grab-you book. I love its beating, beaming essence that we are all good, and deserving of love, just as we are. A story of pain, injustice, love, resistance, and hope, this glorious book will lodge inside you and make you feel everything.   Helena Fox, award-winning author of How It Feels to Float and The Quiet and the Loud

Gripping . . . A YA Handmaid's Tale [that] toggles seamlessly between past and present. [For] readers who enjoy dystopian books with feminist themes and stories that highlight the power of queer community.   Booklist