Pressia Belge is the heroine of the novel. A child during the Detonations, Pressia's hand was fused to her doll. Left orphaned, she's been raised by her grandfather, who was fused with a fan that now sits in his throat, drawing ash and dust into his lungs. When the novel opens, Pressia is about to turn 16. Instead of showing up for duty she plans to go into hiding.
The hero is Partridge Willux, whose father is the leader of the "Pures" - those who were admitted into the Dome. Partridge is 17, and is mysteriously impervious to the behavioural conditioning to which all young men in the Dome are subjected. Partridge discovers his father is planning to implant bugs in his eyes and ears so he can be monitored, and to install a trigger switch in his brain that can kill him remotely if he strays out of line. Partridge figures his only chance is to escape the Dome and try to find his rebel mother.
On the outside he meets up with Pressia and, together with their respective love interests and a rogue soldier, they go on the run from the authorities, dodging monsters and henchmen, on a quest to find his mother. Along the way they unravel the truth about the regime.
It's a reasonably long book for YA, but it's a page turner that careers along effortlessly, slowly revealing the wider conspiracy. The writing is concise and descriptive.
Publisher Hachette is billing Pure as "the most anticipated dystopian novel of 2012". They're putting it into a tough category. As dystopian literature goes, Pure isn't as intimate and haunting as Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, and it doesn't come close to the power of the dystopian classics - Brave New World, 1984, Animal Farm, Fahrentheit 451... The regime's political tools are not particularly original: the corruption of admirable ideals, surveillance, propaganda, population control, the creation of a super race. This is dystopia-lite.
However, I did think the Feminine Feminism movement - compulsory for women in the lead-up to the Detonations - struck uncomfortably close to our current adulation of the Domestic Goddess.
"We believe in real education for women," says one highly strung housewife. "We believe in achievement and empowerment, but why does that have to be at odds with simple feminine virtues - beauty and grace and a dedication to home and family? Why does that mean we have to swing a briefcase and be manly?"
Before she returns to the kitchen, her chauvinist husband scolds her. "Dear, dear," he says. "Let's not get political."
Another thing Pure has in common with Twilight: it's a multi-parter. Why does everything have to be a trilogy?
Pure is a fun read with a hurtling plot - but I can't see myself lining up at a bookshop at midnight to buy the sequel in the next year or two. The territory feels a bit worn, and the romance scenes are drippy. But then again I'm not the target market.
I might just wait for Pure 2: The Movie. On DVD.