So much is forgotten in the Republic: the way the seasons used to turn like pages in a book, the technology that once made life easy for everyone, even the art of reading. For fifteen-year-old June, the forgetting goes even deeper, ever since a mysterious accident six years ago stole her mother and her memory. When a strange circus with ties to her family comes through town, she follows them without a second thought. In the outside world, June has to navigate a landscape and society pushed to the edge by the powerful forces of climate change, and to decide who she can trust in a world where everyone seems to have secrets. Can she believe the grizzled deputy who somehow knows more about her past than she does? What about the circus performers, who push her away even as they beguile her best friend? Only when she finally uncovers a truth that threatens to change the Republic forever, will she know who her true family is—and whose life is worth saving.
“The story of a young woman desperately searching for her mom in a harrowing landscape she barely recognizes. All she knows is that the traveling circus might hold the key. Think Station Eleven meets The Road, filtered through the prism of Robert Cormier. Ellen Parent has created a world that isn't ours, but could be—that’s what gives this post-apocalyptic novel its power.”—David Yoo, author of The Choke Artist and Stop Me If You Have Heard This One Before