Verify by Joelle Charbonneau

In a future version of Chicago, the death of a teenager's mother is the catalyst for her to begin questioning, peeling back the layers of her world to discover the truth hidden underneath.





The summary led me to believe this would be a bit different than it is. This isn't a world without lies so much as a world without questions from the public, which isn't the same thing at all.

The idea of removing words to control people isn't new...it wasn't new when George Orwell made it famous in 1984...but it's seen a bit of a surge lately, with several titles in both YA and Adult featuring the idea. Sadly, Verify doesn't add anything new. Some of the ideas around the evolution of tech are intriguing, but even that doesn't seem far enough ahead of where we are now. (Possibly partly justified by Atlas' comment that America is falling behind other countries after closing its borders and refusing travel in either direction.)

My other main problem with this book is that it doesn't end, it stops. I understand it's part of a duology, but there are ways to end the first book without simply stopping dead; Brigid Kemmerer managed it wonderfully in her Cursebreakers duology, off the top of my head, and so do plenty of others. This honestly reads like Joelle wrote the whole thing at once, measured out the halfway point and cut it in half there.

An intriguing idea, but sadly not the best execution.

Meri Beckley lives in a world without lies. When she turns on the news, she hears only the facts. When she swipes the pages of her online textbooks, she reads only the truth. When she looks at the peaceful Chicago streets, she feels the pride everyone in the country feels about the era of unprecedented hope and prosperity over which the government presides.

But when Meri’s mother is killed, Meri suddenly has questions that no one else seems to be asking. And when she tries to uncover her mother’s state of mind in her last weeks, she finds herself drawn into a secret world full of facts she’s never heard and a history she didn’t know existed.

Suddenly, Meri is faced with a choice between accepting the “truth” she has been taught or embracing a world the government doesn’t want anyone to see—a world where words have the power to change the course of a country, and the wrong word can get Meri killed.