GoodHouse By Peyton Marshall

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Peyton Marshall
9780857521903

With soaring literary prose and the tense pacing of a thriller, the first-time novelist Peyton Marshall imagines a grim and startling future. At the end of the twenty-first centuryin a transformed Americathe families of convicted felons are tested for a set of genetic markers. Boys who test positive become compulsory wards of the stateremoved from their homes and raised on Goodhouse campuses, where they learn to reform their darkest thoughts and impulses. Goodhouse is a feral placepart prison, part boarding schooland now a radical religious group, the Holy Redeemer's Church of Purity, has begun to target these schools for attack, with purifying fire.
We see all this through the eyes of James, a transfer student who watched the radicals set fire to his old Goodhouse and everyone he'd ever known. In addition to entering a new school with new rules, James now has to contend with Bethany, a wild tech genius with a heart defect who wants to save him, and her father, the sinister director of medical studies. Soon, however, James realizes that the biggest threat might already be there, inside the fortified walls of Goodhouse. Partly based on the true story of the nineteenth-century Preston School of Industry and the boys who lived and died in its halls, Goodhouse explores questions of identity and free willand what it means to test the limits of human endurance.