When someone's locked away for doing the right thing, that makes them a prisoner of conscience. Not merely a grounded teenager. [p. 62]
Beck Garrison lives on a seastead off the west coast of the USA: her father is an influential member of the community, and Beck's mother died in a car crash before they left California. Beck is sixteen and earns pocket money by working as a seeker: she takes requests for things that people want, and sources them from other inhabitants of the seastead. One day, trying to locate a pair of sparkly sandals, size eight, she's asked instead to discover what happened to a bond worker's missing sister. Beck's investigations bring her into conflict with the leaders of the seastead, and -- not quite coincidentally -- into the surreal and influential world of reality TV. She finds much more than she set out to find, and is instrumental in instigating sweeping changes that affect every inhabitant (bonded worker, guest worker or stakeholder) of the seastead.
Beck is a tough-minded and courageous narrator, with considerable chutzpah (at least in part because of her father's status) and determination. Kritzer shows us Beck exploring the hidden underside of the libertarian seastead, and discovering some uncomfortable truths about the privilege which she has enjoyed since childhood. The seastead -- actually six 'nations', assembled from a motley collection of cruise ships, artifical islands and oil rigs -- is an experiment in utopian living, with an ambiguous relationship to the USA, from where many of the inhabitants have migrated. The draconian laws of the US contrast with the lawlessness of the seastead, and especially of Liberty, a nation known for having no law at all.
I greatly enjoyed Catfishing on CatNet, so had high hopes of this novel: I was not disappointed. Though the setting was, in some ways, comparable to Brightly Burning, the world-building here felt more solid, and the social aspects more foregrounded than the romance.
Shortlisted for the Lodestar Award for Best YA Book, 2024: read as part of the Hugo Voters' Pack.
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