Goodhouse

July 21, 2014
James, the narrator of Marshall’s dystopian debut, is a student at Goodhouse: the part-school/part-penitentiary of the future, responsible for the reeducation of children who carry a genetic marker predisposing them to crime. At age 17, James is still innocent, but when he steals a barrette from a young girl’s room on an outreach day, the discovery of his first crime sets in motion a complex string of overlapping plots with James near their center. Among the threats to James is the Zeros: militant activists bent on cleansing the world of the criminally predisposed by whatever means necessary, their threat around every corner. Bethany, the teen whose barrette James stole, insists on pushing her way into his life, though her love could get James killed. Dr. Cleveland, Bethany’s enigmatic father, may be James’s only ally among the Goodhouse staff. Or he may be a terrorist. It depends on whether James’s prescription-tainted, increasingly unreliable perspective can be trusted. Marshall’s novel moves well, and the adolescent James is convincingly off-balance throughout. The result is a genre-bending thriller with a literary voice that at times trades heart for velocity but ultimately pleases.

July 1, 2014
Marshall's debut imagines a near-future America in which the environment is degraded, the social fabric is unraveling, and foreign wars are never-ending. Sound familiar?James is one of the young boys placed in the Goodhouse system when mandatory genetic testing reveals he has "certain biometric markers" common in violent criminals. Raised as wards of the state, James and his fellows are trained in "right-thinking" so they can be released at 18 to join society, though only those with Level 1 status will be fully assimilated. Meanwhile, they're subject to the arbitrary, brutal supervision of proctors and class leaders. And recently, a group of religious fanatics called Zeros has been attacking Goodhouses, claiming the boys are unredeemable and must be killed: "Only then would the oceans teem once more with life...the weather normalize...would there be peace." It's a good setup, and Marshall gives us an appropriately troubled protagonist, haunted by memories of the deadly Zero attack on his former Goodhouse in Oregon. Relocated to Ione, California, James soon gets into trouble thanks to his encounter on Community Day with a civilian girl named Bethany; she's contemptuous of the pieties James carefully utters and encourages him to break the rules. Far more dangerous than James' attraction to Bethany is his tangled connection with her father, Dr. A.J. Cleveland, a researcher (and covert Zero ally) at the Ione Goodhouse who protects James only because he needs a guinea pig for his dangerous drug experiment. The plot moves briskly, with James and his friend Owen losing their Level 1 status and sinking into the Goodhouse depths while Zero activity becomes more aggressive, culminating in an attack on Ione. A cautiously optimistic ending offers some hope but shows this world still insecure and unjust.Well-plotted and written but lacking any truly original spark that would distinguish it in the increasingly crowded genre of dystopian fiction starring hard-pressed young adults.

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Starred review from September 1, 2014

Incarceration in the Goodhouse system is tough enough, but protagonist James is in a worse spot in Marshall's debut novel. Goodhouse facilities are prison/reeducation camps for boys identified as having a genetic tendency toward violent behavior. But are they born criminals, or does the Goodhouse program make them violent? Life there is hard, with class leaders who keep positions through violence, experimental drug regimes, and roommates who report the tiniest infraction rather than risk the chance that they will be one of the few allowed to return to normal society. Now a religious extremist group, the Zeros, wants something even worse for the Goodhouse boys: their fiery eradication. James escaped an Iowa fire bombing, only to find himself moved to a tougher California Goodhouse. An encounter with a strange, brilliant girl with a heart problem on the one day he is allowed to leave campus sends him down a rabbit hole of twisting loyalties, near escapes, and chilling dangers. VERDICT A cut above the strong recent crop of dystopian futures, with a sympathetic protagonist, a believably degenerated society, and harrowing pacing, this deserves a wide audience.--Neil Hollands, Williamsburg Regional Lib., VA

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2014
It's the near-distant future, and genetic testing is mandatory for the family of anyone who has committed a violent felony. If male children under the age of 6 test positive, they are remanded to the Goodhouse system, a collection of school-prisons where the children are to be given new lives, remade from the inside out. James, now 17, has been in the system since he was 3. There is no escape from it, or is there? An apparent new future emerges when James meets a civilian girl named Bethany, whose sinister father is director of Medical Studies at James' Goodhouse facility. The system itself is threatened by a religious cult called the Holy Redeemer's Church of Purity, and when James and Bethany attempt to flee, they find themselves threatened by both organizations. Loosely based on the now-shuttered, real-world Preston Youth Correctional Facility in California, Marshall's dystopian first novel is replete with apocalyptic incident that sometimes defies belief, especially Bethany's endless array of abilities and resources, but, nevertheless, Goodhouse is richly imagined and builds to a satisfyingly suspenseful conclusion.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)