Goodhouse

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. (Oct.)