Carrier

Carrier by Anne Tibbets
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a strong book, very strong. And not because the characters are strong - which they are - but because it carries a strong message.

Carrier is a dystopian story about Naya, a sex slave who is released from confinement and has to then deal with the real world. She's been on "the Line" for nine years; essentially a government-sanctioned brothel. The women are prisoners kept in cells. The food is terrible but the medical care is relatively good. And they have 10 "appointments" per day, seven days per week. She was sold into this life when she was 13.

Naya is strong; she's shut down her emotions in order to cope with her imprisonment. As the story unfolds, we watch her get in touch with those emotions she held at bay for so long. We watch her flounder in the real world, trying to find solutions to the challenges she faces. We watch her struggle to trust people who want to help her. We see her emerge as a person. She is never a victim; rather, she continually tries to face her situation realistically and her naivete lends a sense of realism. She garners our admiration, not our pity.

The other characters are relatively well-developed but not overly so. We are given enough of them to want more, and as this is the first book in a series, it is to be expected that the secondary characters will change and grow.

The story is slow at first, and this is primarily because Naya is trying to figure out what to do with herself. How does she solve the problems with which she's faced? But even with the pace slowing, the world building that happens is substantial. The story doesn't lag - it's more like a change of focus. The background becomes clearer for a bit, and then we focus back in on the main character.

The plot was a standard dystopian-bad-government-wants-to-take-over-the-world-at-everyone's-expense sort of thing. It would have been just another in the long line of YA publishing today, except this isn't YA. It's NA and that's important. Naya is 22 years old and those around her are also her age and older. These are not teenagers and in many ways that makes this a much more believable story. The story here is relevant today and addresses several things, the sex-slave trade being the most prominent. We see poverty, people trapped in horrible situations with no choices or opportunities to get out. There are desperate people doing desperate things. There is a general disdain for life; add to that all the emotional fallout that these situations entail and the book could be one big sinkhole of despair.

But it's not. There is action and hope throughout. It may not be a completely original plot, but the setting is definitely original. There is virtually no romance, which is also refreshing because of the main character's situation. Her relationships grow slowly.

This is a great book with extremely difficult themes. It's not hard to read, but it's hard to look at; the idea that this happens today is a good reminder that we are never as advanced a society as we think we are.

It will be interesting to see where the author takes this series. If the first book is any indication, it will be remarkable.



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