Whensday Bluehouse doesn’t have too much to be happy about. The futuristic world she lives in has constant acid rain, child slave labor, and a Nazi-like government group called the Syndicate that runs everything. She manages to escape the Pits, a quarry where kids work until they die, due to the kindness of an old coffin maker, who hides her in his Lifehole. When a lady from Top Town, the big city where the rich live sheltered from the rain, offers the coffin maker money if he will sell her Whensday, Whensday has no choice but to run away and try to find some kind of future in the bleak landscape of Bone Trees and Safe Jam. This book stuck in my throat and lodged in my heart. It’s depressing and exhilarating all at once, and not many books can make that claim. Read it and weep.
