Early on in Seconds, by Abigail Wilkes, the main character receives a secret message from someone in her previous, hidden life, and she’s frightened that if her true identity were revealed, she could be banished. At first, I thought this meant that it would be a spy novel. Also, there’s a part on an island of people who say “it be” and “ye” all the time, and they’re desperate to build a boat to get away. This had me hoping for a pirate book, especially since characters are missing body parts. And don’t you think that more pirate stories would help the Christian fiction genre? I mean, what could be more fun than pirates spreading the gospel and saying “Twenty-seven books arrrr in the New Testament”? But alas, this book wasn’t a spy book or a pirate book. Instead, it has multiple layers of dystopia, magic, and the right to life working throughout.
The setting is El-Pelusium, an ancient city-state in which a rebellion that had occurred 300 years earlier caused a strict policy to be put in place banning second-born children from being allowed to live in the city. Firstborn children are permitted, but after that, the parents are expected to either sterilize themselves or abort future pregnancies (‘nullify’ is the word that they use for that). Precisely what happened 300 years earlier isn’t known, but second-born children were said to have possessed powers that are now forbidden to even speak of.
Some families have Seconds, but if they’re found, they’re sent to an island called Thoth, which is run by a madman, and they never come back. There are rumored to be Seconds living among the city of Firsts, but their existence is considered shameful. Miki, the main character, has it especially bad as her parents kept having children, and she is a Fifth. At the age of 15, she left her parents’ home and invented an identity as an orphan and found work as an assistant in a cloth shop, only able to have rare contact with her family.
Okay, before I get into what I thought of the plot, there is one thing about the premise that was driving me absolutely bonkers: El-Pelusium has been running a one-child policy for three hundred years, and that is impossible. With a fertility rate below one baby per woman, the city would vanish after a few decades.
Setting aside the math problem, this is an impressive book. The plot kept me going and kept me guessing through the whole story. We get to see both the lives of the firstborn in the city and the lives of the banished people on the island. We see both the rulers of the city and the people who have to deal with the policies. Ultimately, this is a book about the dangers of hate. This society has been hating its own members for centuries, and Miki and others have to put it back together. It takes a while for Miki to find her mission as she spends most of the book just trying to survive, but once she does, the story leads to some impressive superhero-like smackdown fights as the Very Bad Guys get their comeuppance and the Slightly Bad Guys come to see the errors of their ways. The main villain is well developed, believing he’s a hero through the whole thing, although I wish Miki had gotten more time facing off against said villain.
I can’t really say more without giving away the plot, but I will add a couple of things — a woman is severely beaten, and then she falls in love with her abuser. At first I thought, ew, this is bodice-ripper material. Still, the book handles the topic better than I had expected, as we see both the consequences of abuse and rejection and the possibility of coming back from a life as a hated monster.
It’s a very nice book that made me think about the bonds that hold a society together, and the lies that are told to make people do things. Thought-provoking and fun, it’s definitely worth your time.
