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A bighearted dystopian novel about the corrosive effects of fear and the redemptive power of love. With soaring literary prose and the tense pacing of a thriller, the first-time novelist Peyton Marshall imagines a grim and startling future. At the end of the twenty-first century--in a transformed America--the sons of convicted felons are tested for a set of genetic markers. Boys who test positive become compulsory wards of the state--removed from their homes and raised on "Goodhouse" campuses, where they learn to reform their darkest thoughts and impulses. Goodhouse is a savage place--part prison, part boarding school--and now a radical religious group, the Holy Redeemer's Church of Purity, is intent on destroying each campus and purifying every child with fire.