Ink

Debut author Vourvoulias takes the reader to a future America that has embraced prejudice and instituted a formal caste system. Residents of foreign birth and native-born Americans with too-recent foreign connections are marked with tattoos and tagged with GPS units to separate them from full-status citizens. Sympathetic characters struggle against an unjust system where official abuse facilitates racist vigilantism. Vourvoulias invokes injustices in American history, including the Mexican Repatriation of the 1930s, Jim Crow laws, and the Trail of Tears; this deliberate but never gratuitous connection to the past grants the premise a degree of verisimilitude. Less convincing are the voices of the protagonists, often too similar to be easily distinguished. Despite these occasional stylistic shortcomings, readers will be moved by this call for justice in the future and the present. (Oct.)