“I can’t apologize to you. I came to tell you the truth. That’s all.”
-Sonya Kantor, Poster Girl
Poster Girl is the best book I’ve read in a long, long time. I knew I’d enjoy it – I was a child of the dystopian YA lit boom in the late 2000s, and a massive fan of Divergent as a teenager – but I failed to anticipate just now much this book would obsess me. And I am truly obsessed. To all my friends who have been listening to me ramble about this book for the past week, feel free to stop reading now. I know you’re sick of this. Everyone else, read on, and let me tell you — spoiler-free — why Poster Girl is the best book I read this year.
The Premise
Poster Girl is an adult dystopian mystery that takes place ten years after the fall of an oppressive surveillance state known as the Delegation. The Delegation mandated that every citizen be implanted with something called an Insight: a piece of technology that lives in your brain and monitors you constantly, rewarding and punishing every citizen’s behavior. Sonya Kantor, our main character, was a teenager when the Delegation was overthrown, but was given a life sentence for her role as the model on the Delegation’s propaganda posters – the literal poster girl of the old regime. After ten years grappling with the traumatic upending of her world, Sonya is given a miraculous second chance: she’ll be granted her freedom if she can find Grace Ward, an illegal second child who was taken from her parents by the Delegation as a toddler. The hunt for Grace takes Sonya on an eye-opening journey through the new, post-Delegation world, as well as her own past.
As a brief warning, this book discusses some difficult topics, including suicide and sexual assault. We don’t discuss either one in this review, but if you’re considering the book, be advised and take your own comfort level with these topics into account.
Colorful characters, gray morality
As you might imagine from the synopsis above, many of the characters in this book are somewhat morally gray. Very morally gray, in fact. Veronica Roth said in an Instagram Q&A that with Sonya, she set out to write a character who wasn’t a hero – who is guilty of terrible things, and cannot excuse them. She doesn’t lose these qualities by the end of the book, either. Quite the opposite. She does have a character arc, and a beautifully written one, but it’s not focused on redemption or changing the world’s opinion of her. At no point does the story attempt to make excuses for Sonya, or any of the other characters who lie along the same lines.
This kind of character obviously poses a huge challenge for any writer, since you need the reader to connect with and sympathize with the main character, and most of us do not have our faces on the propaganda posters of fallen surveillance states. Yet it’s not hard to connect with Sonya. There is a level of humanity to her – in her uncertainty about her place in the world, the layers of complication in her feelings, her tiny habits and joys and connections with others – that, combined with her moral grayness, makes her irresistibly fascinating as a protagonist. I enjoyed every minute spent inside her head.
The cast of characters as a whole in this book is vibrant and wonderful, and one of my favorite things about it. Almost no one is wholly bad or wholly good, but they are all wholly human. Each of them has a spark of beautiful realism and three-dimensionality that makes the world of the story feel incredibly full and fleshed-out. There is something to love and something to despise in each of them, and these aspects always balance each other perfectly. It all plays beautifully into the notion that people, in the end, are people, and that our lives and the worlds we build to live them in are complex beyond imagining.
The other side-effect of the moral grayness in this book is that when you get to the part where the gray area stops and the “Oh, wait, that’s horrifying no matter which way you look at it” part begins, it hits you like a truck. Much harder than it ever would have if things had been black and white from the start. The internal conflict that flows from that sudden onset of clarity after so much uncertainty is one of the most poignant moments of the story, and one of my personal favorite parts of the book. It’s a gut-wrenching, beautifully executed shift in viewpoint that does exactly what it needs to do in terms of driving home the point of the story, and making you feel that point right down to your bones.
Speaking of which, let’s talk about…
Theme & symbolism
This book is so jam-packed with symbolism, so absolutely dripping with thematic resonance and meaning, that I think it could keep a room full of lit majors busy for about seven years. Since my brain is basically run by a room full of tiny, unfocused, over-caffeinated lit majors running on hamster wheels, I loved every second of it. I recently started using color-coded sticky tabs in books I know I’m going to review to mark things I want to talk about, and the color I was using for “I spy with my little eye, symbolism” was the first to get used up. (The dandelions, guys. I could write a whole essay about the dandelions.)
There are a lot of very big themes in this book that I think were pulled off truly masterfully. In particular, Poster Girl asks very tough questions about technology and society and the ethics of their entanglement, all of which feel mightily relevant in the modern world. I particularly loved the bit about the ethics of creating something without knowing what it’s going to be used for, and trusting society to not use it for evil once you release it into the world. This is an ever-present ethical concern in my field – aerospace engineering – and one I’ve spent a lot of time pondering. If I design something that gets put on an airplane that is later sent out to bomb someone, who is responsible? It’s an uncomfortable question, and one absolutely no one likes answering. But Roth answers it, courageously and with a depth that honors the complexity of the emotions behind it stunningly well.
That’s just one of the many questions this book poses, and one of the many examples of moments that deliver a gut-punch of thematic meaning that stays with you long after the last page. Veronica Roth has always struck me as an author who writes because she has something to say about our world that no one else will, and I think Poster Girl is a triumph in this department, from start to finish.
About that setting
Western Washington – and more specifically Seattle – was the perfect setting for this book, and Veronica Roth captured it beautifully. I was born and raised there, so I can say that with confidence. Much as I love this area and don’t plan on ever leaving, I have to admit the tech-obsessed dystopia bedecked with crumbling, patchwork infrastructure which Roth paints in Poster Girl just sounded to me like… Seattle. Well, Seattle with faster public transport. It’s such a treat to read about your own city through someone else’s eyes, especially when it’s clear the author shares your feelings about the prevalence of litter and depressing brutalist architecture. I have no proof of this, but I think Roth must have come to Seattle at some point, took one look around, and said, “Yeah, these people would inject a smartphone into their brains for sure — and Puget Sound would still be gross.” And you know what? She was probably right.
I was so delighted by all this that the real horror of it all didn’t sink in for me until a section fairly late in the book where the characters travel east, right through the foothills where I grew up, and stop briefly in a neighborhood called Gilman. I am intimately familiar with Gilman – it’s an adorable neighborhood in the adorable city of Issaquah. She describes it as a low sprawl of boarded-up buildings that were once little stores and fast food restaurants, a passage that directly implies the boarding-up of my Taco Bell. That was the point where a chill went down my spine, and the dystopian-ness of it all began to set in. (I jest. Mostly.)
All jokes aside, though, I truly can’t imagine this story taking place anywhere else, from the landscape to the architecture to the culture and everything beyond. I remember reading Divergent in high school and loving the way Roth took the modern-day landmarks of Chicago and reimagined how they’d be interpreted and used by a different kind of society. She’s a master of this particular brand of worldbuilding, and Poster Girl’s treatment of Seattle is no exception. The world of Poster Girl is complex, beautifully executed, immersive, and packed with carefully crafted environmental storytelling that enriches the story beyond measure. Seattlite or not, I guarantee you’ll love it.
A brief technical note
This is such a small thing that I’m not even sure it warrants its own section, but since it’s something I’ve talked about extensively on this blog before, I wanted to call it out. Third person present tense narration was an excellent choice for this book. The only choice, perhaps. Third person present is considered fairly unusual, but if you’re looking for a case study on where it belongs, look no further than Poster Girl. The narration style has all the immediacy and punch of present tense, but with a kind of distance given to it by the third person narrator that makes it feel almost nostalgic.
This is perfect for a story about a woman grappling with a past she can never return to, and a world struggling to find its way forward after years of turmoil and mistakes. The narration carries the same uncomfortably detached feeling Sonya carries with her for most of the book. When she talks about the distance she feels from the world her world has grown into, you feel that distance right along with her. When she feels oddly disconnected from that world, and even from her own body, you feel that too. And a large part of that, I think, is down to the choice of POV and tense. That distance and detachment coupled jarringly with the intimacy of seeing Sonya’s inner world also serves as a constant reminder of how she is being monitored and surveilled at every moment in the story.
It’s deep POV, but held at arm’s length – and it is perfect.
Final verdict
I tried – I actually tried – to think of something I didn’t like about this book, and I couldn’t come up with anything. I did make one prediction about the plot that I am still mildly baffled did not turn out to be the case, but I don’t think it’s fair to detract points from a review based on my wild misinterpretations. Especially given my champion-level overthinking skills (seriously, you should see the number of sticky notes I have on this book that are color-coded as being possible foreshadowing… it’s more than any reasonable author ever puts in any book, ever, and I should have known that).
In light of this, I give Poster Girl 5/5 boarded-up Taco Bells, and a permanent spot on my list of favorite books. If you haven’t picked up a copy, I highly recommend you do – it’s a fast-paced, deeply-feeling, and intensely thought-provoking story you won’t be able to put down.
Happy reading!