7. Nicole argues that loving pain is the only autonomy she can get. Where is she coming from? Would you argue with her?
8. Jamie and Shay almost lose hope when they realize the governor is within the Pater Society’s realm of influence. How does their emergency podcast broadcast circumvent this problem? Who can we trust when our highest authorities are corrupt?
9. Shay persists in viewing Laurel as a victim. Do you agree? What do Shay’s expectations for Laurel prevent Shay from seeing?
10. Why does Shay decide to take Don’s punishment into her own hands? Can you imagine what choice you would make in her position? What will happen to Shay now?
A Conversation with the Author
The concept of beauty carries danger throughout the book, but it doesn’t seem to be within Shay’s control. Do you think it’s possible to truly weaponize beauty? Could Shay accomplish such a thing?
On the one hand, of course beauty holds power. While what’s considered beautiful is culturally dependent, being perceived as beautiful tends to be an advantage universally. Look at any number of psychological studies on attractiveness and it’s easy to see that those who are considered attractive have innate social advantages. Speaking from within a white Western historical context, beauty has historically mattered more for women, because it’s been one of the few advantages at women’s disposal. When power is scarce, you’ll snap up anything. Think about when women weren’t allowed to work or control their own finances, and their fate rested on who they married—in those circumstances, beauty was at least somewhat of a power you could wield to have some measure of control over your life. Of course, you can already see in this example the double-edged sword of beauty: not only its limits compared to other forms of power （money, positions of influence, etc.）， but the fact that it requires a beholder to grant power in the first place. Beauty’s power is a precarious and contingent one.
A lot of scholars have written fascinatingly about beauty, so I won’t retread territory, but I will say that in modern Western society, even as women accumulate more hard power—jobs, influence, capital—beauty remains something women cling to disproportionately. In one sense, it’s natural: we all want to be capable of attracting others. That’s nothing to sneer at. But on the larger whole, I wonder if our obsession with beauty is a vestigial instinct, one that shows women haven’t made the kinds of gains in hard power we should have, so we still need the assist.
If a beautiful woman is the last person left on earth, does her beauty matter? Maybe in some abstract sense, but pragmatically, no. Beauty is always a two-way street. So who holds the true power: the beautiful person or the person looking? If you’ve read anything about the male gaze, you’re probably yelling The looker! But this is the tension Shay struggles with throughout the book, especially in her adolescence. Because she has so little power otherwise—no financial security, little in the way of emotional support, teachers who don’t give her brain the same credit they give Jamie’s—beauty comes to seem like this incredible boon, the one thing she has. Which is especially complicated given that from the moment Shay hits puberty and starts to get noticed by men, she understands this sort of attention is also dangerous and uncomfortable.
But what else does she have to lean on? She uses her beauty in the pageants to get out of Heller; she uses it in her dalliances with boys and men to bolster her social power. The problem is, as we discussed, it can be hard to discern who’s really in charge. Shay misunderstands the power dynamics with Anderson Thomas in high school and with Don in college to great and tragic consequence. While of course Shay has more opportunities than women 150 years ago, in some uncomfortable ways, her life looks similar to the life of the woman I described earlier, whose beauty afforded her the only measure of control over her life. This is the great irony of the Paters: they’re obsessed with returning to the good old days when men “rightfully” held all the hard power and women were reliant on them, but as Nicole points out, for a lot of women, particularly those not born into economic privilege, there’s no need to return—life still looks like that.