It’s hard to grade a book that tries to be several things and has very different outcomes in each. The romance isn’t great. The world building is interesting. Most characters are well-developed. The ethical questions are salient. Ultimately, I think, Landry Park tells us more about ourselves than it does about its own world.

About two hundred years in the future, global warming has caused power to revert to agricultural aristocracy called the Gentry. Madeline Landry stands to inherit the most prestigious Gentry estate, even if it is now essentially bankrupt. Her ancestor Jacob Landry invented small-scale, portable nuclear technology and established the caste system in which the lowest-ranked Rootless handle the radioactive waste, dying horribly and young. While investigating a mysterious attack on a Gentry girl, Madeline meets the wealthy David Dana and begins to question the structure of her world.

Madeline and David are actually the least interesting characters. Madeline is an iconoclast, just like every other YA heroine who’d rather read than attend parties and wears clothing that doesn’t match her awkwardly slim frame and gross pale complexion. David is a Scarlet Pimpernel knock-off who runs hot and cold on Madeline depending on how progressive the last six words she said are. I had hardly any interest in their relationship, and the book would have been the same if the author had omitted romance entirely.

On the other hand, Madeline and many other characters have a degree of moral complexity that is unusual in techy thrillers. As Madeline becomes more aware of the suffering of the Rootless, she wants desperately to help – but her lifestyle is very comfortable, and her family legacy is storied, and she struggles to wholeheartedly desire their overthrow. Madeline’s parents are alternately despicable and affectionate, and fellow Gentry girl Cara isn’t the bitchy blonde bully she seems at first.

Like most dystopias, YA or otherwise, Landry Park doesn’t hold together well the closer you look at it. America’s political rival, the Eastern Empire, is an alliance somehow created out of China, Japan, Russia, and several other countries which have disliked and/or fought each other for over a thousand years. America’s energy is nuclear, yet nearly all of America’s uranium is located in the west, which in the story has been conquered by the Eastern Empire. And I’d like to introduce the Casablanca Rule for YA fiction: as Rick Blaine said, “The problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” So stop making the outbreak and outcome of revolutions utterly reliant on the decisions of a few seventeen-year-olds.

Mostly, Landry Park is about modern America’s fears. The Eastern Empire represents contemporary fears of political decline (and the ever-classic, ever-racist Yellow Peril). Climate, which has devastated the coasts and transformed the climate, is its own threat. The Rootless represent income inequality and labor exploitation. The author’s aggressive insistence that the classes aren’t race-based jarringly tries to create a utopian element in the midst of a dystopia, and smacks rather awkwardly of “Some of my richest characters are black.” In addition to the deliberate echoing of Regency England, there are parallels to the American Civil War and to the Industrial Revolution.

In the genre of “novels for a ninth grade social studies gifted program,” Landry Park would get an A+, and I recommend it if you’re shopping for a school library or a politically-minded young person. For fiction or dystopia, it’s a high B, with character depth and a plot that keeps the page turning, but an underdeveloped setting and some flaws in the premise. For romance, it’s nearly a C. I’ll split the difference and give it a B+, with the caveat that you may find it massively better or massively worse, depending on what you’re looking for.