Welcome to…
Assimilation
When Alyssa is captured by the regime that killed her father, she finds herself caught between a desire to live and the fear of losing her soul.
Welcome to…
When sixteen-year-old Alyssa is captured by the regime that killed her father, she finds herself caught between a desire to live and the fear of losing her soul.
Assimilation
Comparative Titles
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Comparative Titles ~
Comparative Titles
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Comparative Titles ~
Comparative Titles
With commercial prose and an upmarket concept, Assimilation will appeal to fans of modern dystopian adventures such as Sunrise on the Reaping and Red Rising, and classic dystopian warnings such as Darkness at Noon and 1984.
Similar to The Handmaid's Tale, Assimilation argues that the most chilling dystopias aren't the ones that break their protagonists by force, but the ones that make compliance feel like the only reasonable choice.
Sixteen-year-old Alyssa Reese has spent two years on the run, smuggling children through the underground railroad while dodging the government's brutal Wardens. When she's captured during a desperate rescue mission, the regime doesn't execute her—they have something far worse in mind.
Welcome to Assimilation: a classified government program that transforms the country's most promising youth into its most dangerous weapons. Alyssa arrives determined to escape and return to Neal, the boy she loves, and the life they were building toward the free Republic of Texas. So she'll play along. She'll learn what Assimilation wants her to learn. She'll do what she has to do. All the while, planning her escape.
But that is the trap of Assimilation.
Each compromise feels necessary. Each act of compliance has a reason. Each small surrender makes the next one easier. Alyssa watches herself become faster, stronger, more capable—and tells herself she's winning. That she's beating the government at their own game. That the girl who gave herself up to save the boy she loved is still in there, waiting, and that one day she will find a way out.
She isn't wrong. Not entirely. Not yet.
Assimilation is a story about how institutions don't break people all at once. They reshape them by degrees, one reasonable choice at a time, until the person looking back from the mirror is a stranger wearing a familiar face. It's a warning dressed as a fast-paced dystopian, a love story shadowed by loss, and a question every reader will carry past the last page: at what point does survival stop being worth it?
Synopsis
Synopsis
Praise from Early Readers
“Assimilation is an edge-of-your-seat read with complex characters you love to hate. The last pages made me gasp aloud — I want to know what happens next!”
“This world sucked me in immediately. Ally is an amazingly strong and yet vulnerable heroine. Assimilation is a very serious book with a fairly heavy topic, and yet it was a very breezy read (in the best way). Hard to put it down!”
“Assimilation is a spellbinding story with a need to keep reading until the very end. A heart—pounding experience from the first page to the very last.”
“Each step I took felt necessary. But at what point can I still claim I am pretending? And at what point, without even noticing, have I become one of them?”
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While studying WWII, I became interested in the dilemma of being under the control of an all-powerful dictator. If standing up directly equals death, how far do people bend in order to survive? Some played along publicly but resisted in secret. Others capitulated completely, and still others kept their heads down and simply tried to survive. There was no single “right” answer to this dilemma; rather it was a choice each person had to make for themself.
It was during this time that I had a dream about Alyssa and Neal fleeing through the woods with a group of kids. Two weeks later, I dreamed about Shay using the virtual reality device on Alyssa. I instantly knew these two dreams were from the same world, and thus Assimilation was born.
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I began writing Assimilation in 2010. It took me six years to write a complete first draft. After that, it took another nine years of on-again, off-again revisions. Every time I attended a writing workshop or read a book on craft, Assimilation would come out of its drawer for a fresh revision. This novel taught me how to be a writer and for that I am forever grateful.
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Surprisingly, no. I began writing Assimilation in 2010 and completed the first draft in 2016. At the time, I looked at the trajectory of our world and imagined what might happen if events continued on their current course. For this reason, Assimilation feels hauntingly familiar—but with a few twists.
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Chiavette’s ideology is left-leaning, but he was most closely inspired by Hitler. The use of all-caps in Chiavette’s State of the Union Addresses, specifically, were inspired by the fervour with which Hitler delivered his speeches.
That said, Chiavette was influenced in part by all the major dictators of the twentieth century—Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and the Kim family. There are clear patterns to how dictators seize power and how they keep ahold of power once they’re in control, and I used these patterns to form Chiavette.
Note: I would highly recommend the TV show How to Become a Tyrant, narrated by Peter Dinklage. This show explains the patterns of tyranny throughout modern history, empowering people to recognize a true leader from a rising tyrant.
Assimilation FAQs
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Assimilation FAQs ~
Assimilation FAQs
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Assimilation FAQs ~
Assimilation FAQs
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Shay, because she's very cold and analytical. It doesn't matter if it takes her 10 years, she will get her revenge.
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Classic dystopias such as 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, Animal Farm, The Giver, and Fahrenheit 451. And…you know…The Hunger Games (can I call that a classic yet?).
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To be determined! Though we’ll see more of Neal and the Senpago if there is…
