Master Class

Starred review from February 10, 2020
In this disturbing dystopian tale set in the near future from Dalcher (Vox), the U.S. government has adopted a ranking system for pre–college age students, dividing them into groups based on a constantly monitored quotient or Q score. The brightest attend elite schools, while those whose quotients are at the low end are taken away from their parents and bused to remote state boarding schools. The ranking system expands to adults, who are given preferential treatment in store checkout lines based on their Q scores. This nightmare is the priority for federal secretary of education Madeleine Sinclair, whose first deputy, Malcolm Fairchild, is married to a teacher, Elena Fairchild, whose offhand remark to him years before during high school led to the current system: “Wouldn’t it be great if all the people we hated could carry their crappy GPAs around for life?” When Elena’s nine-year-old daughter is taken away to a boarding school, Elena is forced to confront the monstrous system she’s been complicit in. Dalcher combines the pace and tension of a standout thriller with thought-provoking projections of the possible end result of ranking children based on test scores. Admirers of The Handmaid’s Tale will be appropriately unsettled. Agent: Laura Bradford, Bradford Literary.

February 15, 2020
A woman takes on the educational system in order to save her daughter in this dystopian thriller. Elena Fairchild has two daughters--Anne, 16, who does extremely well in school, and Freddie, 9, who has intense anxiety and struggles to keep up her grades--and is married to Malcolm Fairchild, the man who helped implement a new government educational system in which each person is assigned a Q, a number based largely on intelligence that determines their place in society. Elena, a teacher at an elite school, conducts each month's Q tests with dread, watching more and more children fall through the cracks. When Freddie bombs her tests and her Q drops below 8, Elena knows the girl will be taken away to a boarding school half the country away and her family will have few opportunities to visit or even talk to her. Elena's grandmother, who grew up in Germany during the run-up to World War II, warns her that she must rescue her daughter before it's too late. With everything against her, Elena throws caution to the wind in an attempt to get Freddie back. Dalcher (Vox, 2018) is no stranger to tackling social issues in her fiction, and this time she turns her eye to eugenics. The book's examination of the way people will accept more and more small social changes until the system becomes something unrecognizable and horrific feels timely and urgent. There are moments when this message is delivered in an overly blunt way, but it's an important enough idea that the book works anyway. The world is fully realized, though it isn't clear if it's set in the present day or a near future. The writing, however, is top notch and keeps the reader guessing. An engaging parable of dangerous social change.

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February 15, 2020
The author of the best-seller Vox (2018) imagines a different type of dystopian nightmare inspired by the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century. Elena Fairchild grew up resenting the pretty, popular kids who shunned her, but as time went on, she and Malcolm, whom she ended up marrying, found a way to exact their revenge by giving students privileges based on academic performance. The system they started at school has morphed into a severe national policy dictating that adults and children alike are harshly judged by their "Q" scores, which determine every aspect of their lives. Elena lives to regret the situation she helped set up when the Q score of her youngest daughter, Freddie, falls and she is sent away to a state boarding school. Malcolm, now the deputy secretary of education, refuses to help, so Elena mounts a desperate plan to get her daughter back, one that reveals the horrors suffered by those whose Q scores don't hit the mark. Dalcher's novel reads like an expanded episode of Black Mirror; it is terrifying, haunting, and cautionary.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

November 1, 2019

Shouting out again after her successful debut, Vox, a No. 1 LibraryReads pick and national best seller, Dalcher introduces us to a world where children are routinely tested for their Quotient (Q), with high Q-ers attending elite schools and the rest shoved into state institutions. When daughter Freddie doesn't test out on top, teacher Elena Fairchild transfers from an elite school to a state school to be with her. There, she's alarmed to see that the students are taught little, instead spending their time making profitable handicrafts. What's far worse, they are subject to experimentation, with a new method of chemical sterilization proposed to render low-Q students infertile.

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