The Panopticon: A Novel
by Jenni Fagan
Buy on AmazonLike everyone else in the Panopticon, 15-year-old Anais Hendricks has been in and out of foster care practically since birth. "[B]orn in a nuthouse to nobody that was ever seen again," she had her only successful foster placement with a prostitute later stabbed to death (Anais found the body). She's been sent to this facility, where the inmates are under constant surveillance, because she had a bad history with a policewoman who has been bludgeoned into a coma, and Anais--almost permanently whacked on whatever drug she can lay her hands on--can't explain why she has blood on her skirt.…
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"Anais Hendricks is only 15, but she’s been in trouble for years. She has a serious drug habit, she’s been in foster homes since birth, and she may have put a police officer in a coma. Now, she’s been sent to live in the Panopticon, a social-work housing experiment for young people. All of the units face inward toward a tower full of guards, watching the inmates. And believe me, it’s worth watching Anais, one of my favorite heroines of the year. The plot of The Panopticon is really secondary to the roller coaster of character that is Anais — her intense, first-person narration illuminates the horrors of a young woman failed again and again by the system in Scotland, but does it by suffusing the reader with her own funny, compassionate, hard-as-nails self. By the end of the book, you’ll know a lot of Scottish slang, which may or may not stick with you. Anais, however, most certainly will."
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