Years ago, just before the country was incinerated into a wasteland, ten men and their families started an island colony off the coast. Building a radical society of ancestor worship and the strict rationing of knowledge, they also instilled a controlled breeding process. Only the Wanderers, chosen male descendants of the original ten men, are allowed to cross into the wastelands and scavenge among the still smoldering fires.
Or is this all a story, told to keep the daughters of these men as wives-in-training, going from adolescence right into matrimony. These girls have children when they are children and when they are no longer useful to the society, they drink a final draught and die.
In the summer, though, the children (boys and girls) run wild, fighting over food and shelter, free of their fathers' hands and their mothers' strict rules. A shadow of these summers is the knowledge that as each girl starts menstruation, she faces her Summer of Fruition and immediate marriage and pregnancy. Not all girls feel this is a good thing, including Janey Solomon, who has been starving herself to stave off her menstrual cycle. When little Caitlin Jacobs sees something horrifying right at the end of one summer, she has to share it with the others, driving Janey to bring all the girls together to unravel the mystery of what Caitlin saw and to start an uprising against the island's traditions.
This is a dark story, where some things are hinted out and others are plain stated, which makes for a compelling read. I found I couldn't put this book down (which means sneaking in a few pages here and there and then just all-out reading one afternoon). I'd say that this echoes some of The Handmaid's Tale, where a woman's worth is all about her ability to bear children, but this book takes that idea and runs with it into a pretty shadowy and nasty place. Really a good book and one that's been sticking in my head since I finished it.
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