When She Woke

I was expecting a dark YA classic lit adaptation as a bit of a brain break after a heavy read, but this was not really a young adult book, and unexpectedly shared some themes around religion and morality with my previous book. Hillary Jordan riffs on The Scarlet Letter, bringing it forward in time and evoking Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale for good measure. Hannah Payne lives in a near-future United States, in a world that has been changed profoundly by a mutated STD that caused a fertility crisis, a nuclear attack on Los Angeles, and a new way to deal with crime: an injection that literally changes a person's skin color for the duration of their sentence, with different shades correlating to different crimes. Hannah, born and raised in a conservative evangelical household in Texas, is a Red, reserved for crimes of violence. She's had an abortion, and refused to name both her doctor and the man who would have been the father of her child...who just so happens to be a mega-church preacher and newly appointed federal official, the pastor Aiden Dale. Once she's released from her brief prison sentence (in which she, like her fellow prisoners, is broadcast live to reality TV), she finds herself facing choices she never could have imagined before her ill-fated love affair. I've always had a soft spot for The Scarlet Letter, and I enjoyed the little callbacks to it, like Hannah's skill as a seamstress and a nod to Hester Prynne's daughter Pearl. There's a development near the end that felt a little forced, and an ending that lacked the satisfaction of the one that Nathaniel Hawthorne devised. There's also a lot of Hannah reckoning with her faith particularly and belief generally, contemplating the existence of a higher power in a world of profound injustice. It was more philosophically inclined than I'd expected. It was perfectly okay and I suspect I will hardly remember it six months from now.