The Doubt Factory

Emma Galvin's slightly nasal delivery works well for the dialogue in this young adult thriller. As a rich high school girl is being stalked, the story also mixes in a lot of commentary about product liability defense and the pharmaceutical industry. Listeners who get through the preliminaries will want to finish the audiobook. Galvin does a good job differentiating the mostly teenage characters. However, her delivery doesn't work quite as well for the menacing adults who are secondary characters. Nonetheless, Galvin's pace is always good, and she breathes life into some lengthy monologues. F.C. © AudioFile 2015, Portland, Maine

Starred review from August 11, 2014
In this provocative thriller, Bacigalupi (The Drowned Cities) traces the awakening of a smart, compassionate, and privileged girl named Alix Banks to ugly realities of contemporary life, while seeking to open readers’ eyes, as well. Alix’s life is thrown into disarray when an activist group targets her family, its eyes on her father’s powerful public relations business. Moses is a charismatic black teen living off the money from a settlement with a pharmaceutical company after one of its medications killed his parents. Along with four other brilliant teens who have lost family to this sort of legal/medical maleficence, Moses hopes to enlist Alix’s help to release incriminating data from her father’s files, à la Edward Snowden. This openly didactic novel asks challenging questions about the immorality of the profit motive and capitalism, but does so within the context of a highly believable plot (backed up with references to actual front groups, lawsuits, warning labels, and literature on the subject, which will send readers to their search engines) and well-developed, multifaceted characters. Fans of Cory Doctorow’s work should love this book. Ages 15–up. Agent: Russell Galen, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency.