Gather the Daughters

On a remote island where girls face a terrible fate, they must find the courage to rise up in this dystopian novel: "a spooky, sure-footed debut" ( People ). Years ago, ten men and their families escaped an incinerated mainland and colonized a distant island. They built a radical society of ancestor worship, controlled breeding, and the strict rationing of knowledge and history. Only the Wanderers—chosen male descendants of the original ten—return to the wastelands, where they scavenge for detritus among the still-smoldering fires. The daughters of these men are wives-in-training. At the first sign of puberty, they face their Summer of Fruition, a ritualistic season that drags them from adolescence to matrimony. They have children, who have children. And when they are no longer useful, they die. But at the end of one summer, little Caitlin Jacob sees something so horrifying, so contradictory to the laws of the island, that she must share it with the others. Seventeen year old Janey Solomon steps up to seek the truth. Rather than become a woman, she is starving herself to death. Trying to unravel the mysteries of the island and what lies beyond, before her own demise, she attempts to lead an uprising of the girls that may be their undoing.