CSFF Blog Tour: Apples and Barrels

Among the true-to-life complexities of Jill Williamson’s Safe Lands series is the diversity of the motley opposition against the Safe Lands government.

There are the people of Glenrock and Jack’s Peak, who were dragged into the city and fell into the war quite haplessly. If the Safe Lands had left them alone, they would have left it alone.

There is the Freedom for Families, comprised principally of Naturals – an underground society that has existed within the shadows almost from the beginning. Theirs is a quiet rebellion.

There is the Black Army – full of disgruntled Safe Landers who, born and bred in the system, now want out.

And there are those without organization, whose need drives them away from normal life in the Safe Lands.

There is an equal diversity of motivations. All Jordan and Levi really care about is taking care of their own. Anything and anybody else? Not their problem.

Mason, though also from Glenrock, has some concern for the Safe Landers themselves, some desire to help them – though it understandably receives a lot of impetus from the fact that he’s falling in love with a Safe Lander. So, too, with Omar: He looks beyond Glenrock to the Safe Lands, his altruism and his self-interest all mixed together. But what he is seeking for himself in these efforts is peace, a place to belong, his own identity.

Bender and Rewl, of the Black Army, seem primarily concerned for themselves – as does Red, who dismisses the government taking a woman’s baby with the words, “I don’t like the government telling me what to do. But babies aren’t my interest.”

Look, I found a libertarian in the Black Army!

Levi, by the way, disclaimed concern for the same baby and mother. He just didn’t bother to articulate his reasons so clearly.

But the Black Army has its noble ones, too. So does the Freedom for Families – people who are not content merely to hide and enjoy their escape, but who have compassion on those still caught in the dark web, whether the difficult elders of Glenrock or the lost souls of the Safe Lands.

I can’t name the bad apples among the FFF, but that’s only because we have seen little of them. As the human heart is always struggling between love and selfishness, and often wrapping them together in the most ingenuous of ways, so every community is made of bad and good. The purest causes draw impure votaries, and unworthy causes have been known to net worthy followers.

Because – for good and for bad, for better or for worse – that’s the way people are.

CSFF Blog Tour: Outcasts

The Safe Lands are many, many things. Safe is not one of them. Visitors must try hard and diligently not to contract the thin plague. Everyone is studiously tracked by the governing authorities, who live by the principle of three strikes and you’re out. Permanently.

And those who manage to make it to forty are liberated, though no one knows what this means beyond “never is seen again”.

Outcasts is the follow-up to Captives, the first book in the Safe Lands series – YA books written by Jill Williamson. I concluded after reading Captives that it was, as one of the characters said of the Safe Lands, fascinating but discouraging; I hoped that, having established the libertine dissolution of the Safe Lands, the series would move on a bit.

And it has. Oh, the Safe Lands are as libertine and dissolute as ever, but there is not so much effort at portraying it, not so much effort at bringing the mores of Glenrock into collision with the mores of the Safe Lands. Everything is more settled in the second book. The characters know better now where they are and where they stand; they’re moving on into the fighting.

Still, revelations continue. The most striking thing about this series is the level of world-building. So complete, so realistic, and so complex is the world of the Safe Lands that the story naturally peels layer off of layer. The made-up slang – so easily a stumbling block in books like this – is one of the most memorable and enjoyable elements of the world-building.

The characters, too, are rounded and complicated. The villains are usually not sympathetic, and the heroes are not always likable – parenthetical statement for those who have read the book: Levi, I’m looking at you – but they seem like real people.

I have a couple criticisms (beware of spoilers): Omar’s final, big fall – the kiss with Kendall and vaping afterward – was unnecessary. I don’t think it made any real difference to the plot, and with the similar incidents earlier in the story, it contributed little to Omar as a character. I didn’t see the point. For that matter, I didn’t see the point of the whole Kendall/Omar/Shaylinn love triangle.

More spoilers: I could not see Otley’s motivation for killing Rewl when he knew that it was the brothers who had led the girls away. And I wouldn’t even mention it here except that that shooting became the basis for a crucial turning point. The climax pivoted, ultimately, on Otley’s decision to shoot Rewl, but the decision is too weak to support such a pivot.

Outcasts is a first-class dystopia – realistic characters in a riveting but believable world that brings all sorts of ideas into play against each other. I am planning to continue with the Safe Lands series; this is a world still to be explored – beginning with what, exactly, it means to be liberated.


In conjunction with the CSFF Blog Tour, I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

CSFF Blog Tour: Dystopia

Today the CSFF blog tour begins its tour of Outcasts, the second book in Jill Williamson’s dystopian Safe Lands series.

Dystopian is in now; you don’t need to look any further than The Hunger Games to know it, and if you look anyway, you’ll see Divergent. YA dystopian is especially in. This has naturally led to all sorts of rumination about dystopias, trends, literary darkness, and teenagers.

Some people attribute the increasing darkness of YA fiction to the increasing darkness of the world around us. In our era of terrorism, school shootings, economic decline and political dysfunction, dystopia is either a dark mirror or a dark comfort. (“Well, America might be unraveling into a social, political, and economic mess – but hey, it could be worse.”)

I wonder about this explanation. The images we swim in might be darker and darker – and someone out there must like it, when you consider how much of the darkness is manufactured in Hollywood for our entertainment – but is the world itself darker? Is our modern experience so much grimmer that it darkens our imagined worlds to match?

At the end of the 1930s, Americans were marking a decade and counting of economic depression, while watching other nations topple into the second world war in twenty-five years. Somehow it didn’t set off lucrative trends into dark stories.

I have no firm theory or settled opinion on the matter, and surely the real explanation is complex and multifactored. And whatever the precise reasons behind the current popularity of dystopias, the essential idea is an old one and is still a compelling way to examine ideas. On that thought, here are the links to

Outcasts on Amazon;

Jill Williamson’s website;

and the blog tour:

Red Bissell
Thomas Fletcher Booher
Beckie Burnham
Pauline Creeden
April Erwin

Victor Gentile

Ryan Heart
Timothy Hicks
Jason Joyner

Julie Bihn
Carol Keen
Meagan @ Blooming with Books
Melanie @ Christian Bookshelf Reviews
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Joan Nienhuis
Nissa
Jalynn Patterson
Writer Rani
Chawna Schroeder
Jacque Stengl

Jojo Sutis
Steve Trower
Phyllis Wheeler
Deborah Wilson

CSFF Blog Tour: Dual Worlds

The back cover of Captives declares it “Teen Fiction”. I would need to think about that.

My fourteen-year-old sister showed interest in this book, after she saw me reading it; I warned her off it. Though discreetly handled, the drug addiction and sensual indulgence were more than I felt comfortable with her reading; nor was I sure that this is the time to initiate an exploration of how pregnancies can be created via medical procedures.

There are things in Captives that some parents would reject for their teens, too-vivid pictures of sin that innocence doesn’t need. Yet I can see how the morals and themes of the novel are suited for young adults more than anyone else – older teens, maybe younger twenties. For, you see, the dual worlds of this dystopia are not too unlike the dual worlds of our present time.

The world is not as dissolute or libertine as the Safe Lands; the Christian community is not as strict or isolated as Glenrock. Yet the parallels may be drawn long.

The Christian community, like Glenrock, has a sternness – you could almost say a harshness – that stands against the looseness of worldly ways. “Take the straight and narrow path, or you’ll go to hell;” “Don’t do that, don’t go there, don’t even think about that.” A Christian is called by the unyielding will and holiness of God to a web of commands and duties.

And the young, brought up in that web and looking out, see the world – all awhirl, glittering with lights and flashing with colors. It promises all you could ever want.

So the Safe Lands were to Mia and Omar, and they believed the promise. But as the whole book shows, the beauty of the world is shallow, and beneath the foam of pleasure is an ocean of despair.

The lessons of Captives – how one can be corrupted by bad company, how the small falls make the large ones easy, how deceptive the world’s seduction is – are good for anyone, but best for those who are facing the temptation of the world for the first time. There are teens who could be invaluably instructed by this book.

But it must be said, there are other ways to learn the same lessons, and some of the scenes are gritty. Whether Captives is indeed “Teen Fiction” is a question I give up to discretion and authority of the parents.

CSFF Blog Tour: Captives

There are two worlds, separate of their own choosing. In the Safe Lands, all is pleasure and comfort and convenience, greased by the omnipresent wonders of technology – except for the thin plague, and until the time of liberation.

In little Glenrock, life is harder and the rules are stricter – but there is the freedom to go, and even to stay much longer.

These two worlds disdain each other on the basis of what they think they know, and keep wide apart – their orbits separated by a stretch of miles, a rising mountain. But that distance – though so long honored – is easily crossed. And when it is, in all the meetings and conflicts that follow, many will have cause to revise what they think, on the basis of what they really do know.

Captives – written by Jill Williamson – is a dystopian novel that takes place in the year 2088. There are some hints of what destroyed our present world – pandemics, the pollution of the earth’s water – but the main focus is on the fractured world that replaced it. Glenrock and its nearby villages are juxtaposed against the Safe Lands, with a few tantalizing mentions thrown toward places such as Denver City and Wyoming.

Jill Williamson explores these societies in great depth. Captives is one of the finest examples of world-building I have ever seen. Williamson’s treatment of these cultures is comprehensive – their family and power structures, their laws, their moral codes, their technology, their history, their cultural suppositions.

Also their benefits, flaws, and blind spots. It is part of the complexity and realism of Captives that no individual or culture is represented as entirely good. One world is clearly better than the other, but both have their own errors, and no one living in either one is entirely right or wrong.

Williamson handles the meeting of these worlds with consummate skill, and allows it to guide the spiritual themes of the story with utter naturalness. The worlds don’t only clash; they intrigue and even tempt. Through the story – what is done far more than what is said – Williamson delivers a powerful lesson in temptation and how people are led astray.

Although always well-done, there were times I did not enjoy Captives. The ‘grit’ – the sin, the temptation, the dissolution – wore on me. There was an excellent moral in watching a neglected teenager fall into bad company and a drug habit, but it was no fun. I am not sure the story needed every bit of grit it had; I know I didn’t.

At one point in the story, one of the outsiders said that the Safe Lands were “both fascinating and discouraging”. So was Captives, to a large extent. I’m still interested in the series – I’m hoping that, having set up the libertine dissolution of the Safe Lands, it will move on a bit – and it is fascinating.

Captives is a phenomenally well-crafted dystopia, guided by Christian spiritual understanding and with enough sympathetic characters* to add human interest to the dystopian intrigue. Take under advisement.


The links to other reviewers are at the bottom of my last post. Captives is marked as teen fiction – a label I will have something to say about tomorrow, but not today. I’ve already said plenty today.

[minor spoilers] * Like Omar and Mason and Shaylinn and Ciddah, but not Levi. He was kind of a jerk sometimes, especially when he was told that a woman’s baby was going to be taken away and Mr. Compassion responded: “Not my problem.” I hated that.

CSFF Blog Tour: Dystopian Dreaming

In the 1930s, civil war wracked Spain. Under the banner of the Republic, socialists and anarchists and Communists threw in their lot together; the Nationalists – granted force by the military and the Catholic Church – responded to the fears of the middle class.

Josef Stalin supported the Republic with arms – always for a price – and controlled the Spanish Communist Party through his agents. In 1937 he reached for even greater power over the Republic, and Caballero, their chosen leader, resisted him; that was the end of Caballero. In due time the Soviets arranged a coup, overthrowing Caballero as head of the Republic and replacing him with a puppet of their own choosing. Thus enabled, the Communists – themselves under the terror of Stalin’s brutal enforcers – took over the Republic of Spain.

And then – following the script Stalin had already written for Russia – the Communists began a purge, the slaughter of their erstwhile political allies. The Republic, while still in a civil war with the Nationalists, entered into a civil war with each other. The Communists tortured and murdered their fellow Leftists by the thousands. Many foreigners were marked for murder; some managed to escape.

George Orwell was among them. After fleeing the bloodbath, he attempted to expose it in print. One editor turned him down on the grounds that it would damage Western support for the Republic.

That editor was wrong. When Orwell finally got his story printed, it affected the Republic very little. The 1930s intellectual elite were more entranced with Communism than the truth, more concerned about Stalin than about the cruelties engulfing life after life in Spain. They assured the victory of the brilliant Communist propaganda.

In a 1946 essay called “Why I write”, Orwell stated, “The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.”

Three years later, he published 1984, modeling his hero Emanuel Goldstein after Andres Nin, a Spanish political leader murdered by the Stalinists in the Republic’s fratricide.

Dystopias are the nightmares of their authors, which are in some measure the nightmares of their societies. They write what they see and what they fear. George Orwell, emerging from the horrors of the 1930s, wrote about totalitarian states, their cruelty and their conquest of truth.

In Captives, Jill Williamson builds a dystopia of our own phantoms – polluted earth, Big Brother, complete social collapse, the final scrapping of all traditional morality. Today Captives begins its CSFF blog tour; I’ll be along with my review later. You can begin your exploration of this twenty-first century dystopia here:

Captives on Amazon;

Jill Williamson’s website;

and, of course, the blog tour:

Julie Bihn
Thomas Fletcher Booher
Keanan Brand
Beckie Burnham
Morgan L. Busse
Jeff Chapman
Pauline Creeden

Emma or Audrey Engel
Victor Gentile
Timothy Hicks
Jason Joyner
Carol Keen
Meagan @ Blooming with Books
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Joan Nienhuis
Asha Marie Pena
Nathan Reimer
Chawna Schroeder
Jojo Sutis
Jessica Thomas
Steve Trower
Phyllis Wheeler
Rachel Wyant