Goodhouse: A Novel

At the end of the twenty-first century in a transformed America, boys who test positive for certain genetic markers are removed from their homes and become wards of the state. They are sent to Goodhouse campuses—institutions that are part prison, part boarding school—where they are trained to reform their darkest thoughts and impulses. These boys are the sons of convicted felons. James, a transfer student, arrives at a new Goodhouse campus after a radical religious group called the Holy Redeemer's Church of Purity set fire to his previous campus, killing nearly everyone he knew. At his new facility, James must navigate unfamiliar rules while contending with Bethany, a brilliant but medically fragile girl who wants to help him, and her father, the school's sinister director of medical studies. As James settles in, he discovers that the greatest danger may come from within the campus walls themselves. Partly inspired by the true history of the nineteenth-century Preston School of Industry, this novel examines questions of identity and free will, and explores what it means to test the limits of human endurance.