The regime that arose in the wake of the attack controlled the remaining population with a brutal police force called the Blue Coats, government-sanctioned drugs and prostitution, and language restriction.

Harper is already disillusioned, but when her daughter's name, Veracity, ends up on the "red list," she flees to an underground bunker in the countryside to join the resistance and impending war against the government.

Club panned the novel as "a weak attempt to update an old genre," criticizing its imagined political future as implausible and its characters as "vanilla, with very little depth.

Critics have drawn parallels to political developments such as the Patriot Act and online surveillance by the National Security Administration and the Chinese government.

[3][4] The novel contains extensive flashbacks, which Ritch Calvin of SUNY Stony Brook argues work with the themes of language and censorship to reinforce a sense of epistemological doubt.