Solis

Published in 2024
271 pages

epub



Paola Mendoza is an author, film director, activist, and artist working at the leading edge of human rights. A co-founder of the Women’s March, she served as its artistic director. Her writing has appeared in The New York TimesHuffington PostGlamourElle and InStyle. Paola is a co-founder of The Resistance Revival Chorus, The Soze Agency and The Meteor.

Abby Sher is an award-winning writer and performer. She is the author of Miss You Love You Hate You ByeAll the Ways the World Can EndBreaking FreeAmen, Amen, Amen: Memoir of a Girl Who Couldn’t Stop Praying, and Kissing Snowflakes. Abby has written and performed for the Second City, Upright Citizens Brigade, HBO, and NPR.

What is this book about?
From the authors of Sanctuary comes a haunting near-future companion tale about undocumented immigrants subjected to deadly experiments in a government labor camp and the four courageous rebels who set into place a daring plan to liberate them.

The year is 2033, and in this near-future America where undocumented people are forced into labor camps, life is bleak. Especially so for seventeen-year-old Rania, a Lebanese teenager from Chicago. When she and her mother were rounded up by the Deportation Force, they were given the brutal job of digging in the labor camp’s mine in search of the destructive and toxic—but potentially world-changing—mineral aqualinium. With this mineral, the corrupt and xenophobic government of the New American Republic could actually control the weather—ending devastating droughts sweeping the planet due to climate change. If the government succeeds, other countries would be at their mercy. Solidifying this power comes at the expense of the undocumented immigrants forced to endure horrendous conditions to mine the mineral or used in cruel experiments to test it, leaving their bodies wracked in extreme pain to the point of death. As the experiments ramp up, things only get worse. Rania and her fellow prisoners decide to start a revolution; if they don’t, they know they will die.

Told by four narrators—Rania, Jess (a former teenage Deportation Force officer), Vali, and Vali’s mother, Liliana—Solis is about the courage and sacrifice it takes to stand and fight for freedom.