caitri | Jun. 4th, 2020

Every day I'm posting an image of a book I like. Santa Olivia came out in 2009, and its sequel Saints Astray came out in 2011. The duology is about a near-future United States that has been devastated culturally and economically by a pandemic, so an overly nationalistic and paranoid government manufactures a terrorist movement through Mexico to build a wall along the border and create a no man's land of the tiny towns caught in between. The first book is about life in one of these "outposts" in which the locals have been stripped of their citizenship and forced to basically re-orient their entire way of life around the army and its soldiers, some of whom feel bad about the whole thing and some of whom revel in their ability to abuse people freely. Our heroine is Loup, a genetically-engineered queer Hispanic teenager who is 10000% done with this bullshit, and the efforts she makes to protect her friends, find justice for her murdered brother, and find happiness with her girlfriend Pilar. The sequel is about escaping to the broader world, and utilizing popular culture and social media to expose injustices and force Congress and the American people to reckon with their problematic past. Also it has a happy ending.

I'm just saying, these are REALLY good books to reread these days.