Cody T Luff

Set in the far future, Ration is an unflinching take on the ways society can both thrive and go wrong as pressure to survive builds.

All the girls who live in the Apartments are forced to weigh their own hunger against the lives of the others living in the building. When Cynthia is wrongly accused of ordering an “A” ration, she is punished by the other girls. Eventually, she is forced to leave the Apartments along with Ms. Glennoc, one of the former managers who has tormented and abused her for years. Together, they encounter a world of even more scarcity, but one filled with politics and intrigue. Cynthia struggles to return to the Apartments and help the girls who are still there.

Forced to reconcile her role in the destruction of these girls with the greater needs of society to find any sustainable source of calories, Ms. Tuttle makes one bad decision after another while she grapples with a mother who is growing more and more impatient with her mistakes.

Ration is a dark and forceful book, written in a surprisingly nuanced and accessible way. It combines the darkness and despair of The Road and The Handmaid’s Tale, but has notes of charm like Lauren Oliver’s Replica.

Most of my stories find me unprepared, caught in traffic, or wandering through breezeways crowded with serious faces and ever more serious bags full of expensive textbooks. Ration found me in the dark and caught me with a single sound. A bare foot step on a thin sodden carpet. Typically, a story pays no attention to my current location or activity, it doesn’t care if I am teaching or commuting, it wants to be heard. Ration whispered in the early hours and after the lights were low and only after I agreed to be still and keep the blinds open to the rain. Characters had their say, peering over my shoulder and slipping away when their words ran dry. Ration is unlike anything I’ve written before and it continues to inhabit the darker spaces of my mind, bare feet scuffing hallways that I have only just begun to explore.