Our score
Excellent
Vox
Christina Dalcher's Vox imagines an America where every woman and girl wears a counter on her wrist and gets one hundred words a day. Dr. Jean McClellan, a neurolinguist locked out of her own field, watches her six-year-old daughter learn that silence wins prizes. A fast, furious dystopian novel for readers who wore out The Handmaid's Tale.
From the review
You start counting. Not on purpose. A few chapters in, Dalcher has trained you so thoroughly on the arithmetic of her world that when Jean McClellan opens her mouth you find yourself tallying against the hundred, flinching at a wasted word, doing math instead of reading dialogue. It is a worldbuilding trick I have almost never seen land this cleanly, and it lands inside thirty pages. The rule is a wrist counter. One hundred words a day for every female in America, the tally visible to anyone who looks, the shock arriving on word one hundred and one and climbing from there. Dalcher cashes that rule out on a six-year-old. Sonia comes home from school pleased with herself, because her class runs a competition for whoever uses the fewest words in a day, and she won. That scene is the whole novel. A child who has been taught that silence is an achievement, by adults who are grading her on it.
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