Review: Poster Girl

Poster Girl by Veronica Roth
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Veronica Roth returns with not a sequel to Chosen Ones - though, as she admits, that one ends on a pretty good standalone note as it is. No, here she brings us another adult sci-fi piece with its roots in a world not out of place in YA, and especially not for one of the biggest riders of the early 2010s post-Hunger Games dystopian wave.

Poster Girl is a relatively bite size novel, especially for a story that's both sci-fi and mystery - and to that end, the world building is deliberately kept rather basic, setting up that we're about ten years past the fall of the Delegation fascist state that ruled the metro regions of the Pacific Northwest. Not much is known about the Delegation, other than that they forcibly implanted every citizen with an ocular implant, the Insight, for 24/7 surveillance, giving and taking their own cryptocurrency to the citizens for any instances of good or bad behavior. (And, as befits fascists, they're kinda racist and homophobic, forcing non-white citizens, like the bold and brash and clear fan fave Asian hacker Emily Knox, to adopt white names for more DesCoin, and documenting in Sonya's file that she may have some bisexual tendencies, as if hoping to use that against her later.) The Delegation also makes heavy use of pharmaceuticals for citizen control, to the point of deploying clouds of sedative serums - guess Roth hasn't forgotten the greatest hits of her original trilogy.

Needless to say, this book is gonna get banned in Communist China, especially if the CCP hears how Roth specifically cited "social credit systems" as some of her inspiration for this book (which she did when she spoke at an event at Powell's Books in Beaverton), not to mention the fact that the Delegation has a one child policy, for which exceptions can be paid for the right amount of DesCoin.

As for the whole mystery element, Sonya is tasked with finding a girl who's been missing since the fall of the Delegation and the rise of the (allegedly) more democratic Triumvirate. If she finds the girl, she'll finally be let out of the Aperture - a privilege long denied her despite the passage of an act that would allow the Aperture's youngest citizens, those who weren't adults under fascism, to live free.

The mystery element builds up to something of an anticlimax, I have to say, but that owes more to the book's brevity than anything else - as well as the removal of a key character whose death I'll probably be more disinclined to forgive Roth for than even the notorious death at the end of Allegiant. But that anticlimax, I have to say, is kind of the point - that even when the fascists fall, who's to say that what comes next is any better?

As The Who once said, "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss."

View all my reviews