You're Safe Here

April 1, 2024
Stephens' debut novel is dystopia at its best. Maggie and Noa live together in the center of a utopia provided by Noa's workplace, a company at its peak, providing the absolute pinnacle of technology to consumers. One of their technological achievements is the WellPod, a floatation device created for consumers to live on for six weeks as they float in the ocean. Maggie, craving adventure and dealing with a fractured relationship, gets on one of these pods, unaware that the founders of the company launched them knowing that they were unstable. Now Noa must do all she can to save her significant other before it is too late. You're Safe Here is a brilliant book which explores several themes at once, never losing a beat while doing so. Global warming, the ever-increasing presence of technology, the decisions that drive relationships, and the real meaning of family are all touched upon as the book races through plot twists to its inevitable conclusion.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 8, 2024
In Stephens’s dramatic dystopian debut, set in 2060, fiancées Noa and Maggie each try to find their place in another woman’s powerful wellness empire. WellCorp, the company run by tech and wellness guru Emmett Neal, provides at-home sanctuary “nests.” Now, Emmett has extended her reach with WellPods, which float in the Pacific Ocean and provide their solo passengers with two months to “regroup in unencumbered isolation and then be, effectively, reborn.” Maggie, a 25-year-old artist, was among the first to sign up for a WellPod voyage, hoping to find a way forward with Noa, a 38-year-old coder for WellCorp. The two were inseparable at first, but after Noa received a dream job at the company, they began to drift apart. Far away in the ocean, Maggie now enjoys her regimented days of AI therapy and machine-made meals, while back at WellCorp, Noa begins to doubt the integrity of the pods thanks to a damning magazine exposé, an approaching storm, and a culture of corporate secrecy. She fights to reunite with Maggie despite the pain each caused the other before Maggie’s departure. Though the ending feels contrived, Stephens deserves praise for seamlessly interweaving a chilling tech dystopia, a corporate thriller, and a rocky romance. It’s a heart-pumping ride. Agent: Claire Friedman, InkWell Management.

April 15, 2024
In the near future, the world is run by WellCorp but all is far from well. Stephens' debut begins in "Zone 874, Pacific Ocean, 29 Days Post-Launch," where we find one of our two heroines, Maggie, alone and afloat in a vessel called a WellPod, which is about to serve her a so-called latte made of mushrooms and root vegetables. "When Maggie could see the brown sludge that coated the bottom of the mug, she placed it back on the coaster, triggering its descent into the table at the same time her gratitude journal slid out from a lower compartment." A passion for worldbuilding continues to drive this story of Lenses, Devices, Injectibles, Pohvees, WellNests, EarDrums, and much, much more as we go landside and meet Maggie's live-in partner, Noa, who works at WellCorp's Malibu campus, where she and Maggie have been assigned a high-tech apartment. With wildfires, earthquakes, and drought having wiped out most of the rest of California, volunteering for a Pod voyage was Maggie's only option for getting out of town--and she really needs a break to figure out what to do about her unexpected pregnancy. Oops. In chapters dated by number of days pre- and post-launch, a complicated story unfolds. One has to do with corporate malfeasance and whistleblowing at WellCorp--were the Pods really ready to launch, and is there a major storm underway? Others involve infidelities and betrayals both past and present. It's hard to keep up with which scary threat you're supposed to be worrying about and which characters you're rooting for--and the constant explanations and exposition dry up the juice. The novel is happiest when preparing and serving futuristic meals. "The hatch of her NutriStation opened and Maggie reached inside for her plate. The diagram projected through her Lens mapped out the baked coconut bacon, sun-yellow cherry tomatoes cooked in lab-grown avocado oil and coated in ancient grains aside tempeh topped with a dollop of collagen- and protein-fortified macadamia nut labneh." Sounds better than the latte, anyway. For connoisseurs of speculative fiction who enjoy detailed worldbuilding.

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