Being John Malkovich meets The Matrix

Stray by Monica Hesse

Lona Sixteen Always doesn’t have her own life. She spends twenty-three hours a day living the life of someone else.

That someone is Julian, a psychologically suitable boy that grew up fifty years ago having all his memories and experiences recorded for Lona and the others on the ‘Path’ to relive for themselves. They’re all on different days of Julian’s life corresponding to their own ages.

They have just one hour per day out of their chairs, primarily for exercise, but also they share Julian’s life with each other – the good days and the bad days.

She didn’t technically remember – none of them did – but she had learned about Before, in one of the presentations that sometimes happened during Calisthenics. Path History. Emotional Well-Being Proper Calisthenics. In this particular presentation they learned about Before Path.. Before Path, Lona would have been beaten or neglected by parents who had been declared unfit. If she were lucky she might have been put in something called ‘foster care’, but even that was dangerous. The presenter showed pictures of a shrunken boy locked in a dog cage, staring through the bars with huge eyes. “That’s how the authorities found him,” the presenter said. “That’s where his foster parents kept him. He didn’t know how to read. He spent every day in his own filth. This is what it used to be like, for everyone like you. You have all been given a very special gift.”

That gift was the Path, the man said. That gift was the fact that when these potentially unfit people disobeyed orders not to have children, the children were rescued and put into a life they never would have been able to have. A good education. Proper nutrition. When the Julian Act was passed in Congress, the CT said, people wept with joy.  (page 17)

One day Lona’s Julian-feed is interrupted by a face she knows – a boy, Fenn who is two years older. They had become friends during their hours out of their chairs, and the last time she’d seen him, he’d ‘touched’ her on the arm – something unheard of. Fenn’s apparition completely disrupts her mental patterns and the bosses decide to take her for remersion, to wipe her memory of it. However before she gets to the centre, Lona is rescued by the band of rebels who have left the Path including Fenn, and finds herself in the real world for the first time since she was a baby. She has a lot to learn very quickly, as the authorities are searching for them. The next few weeks will be very hard, and there will be surprise after surprise as she finds out what happens when teenagers leave the Path for the next steps at seventeen, and who the rebels are…

I really enjoyed reading this book. Not having read the blurb before receiving it, which compares it to Being John Malkovich, I was thinking of The Truman Show, but Julian certainly knew his life is being captured for posterity, if not exactly what for. Then when I started reading, there is definitely an influence of The Matrix there.

A sequel, Burn, will follow in which Lona will explore what happens when the ex-Pathers near the age of eighteen – a critical moment for them. I will be looking out for it as I really enjoyed Stray.  The author has created some great characters in Lona, Fenn -and Julian, and I’m keen to know what comes next.

As for the Path – it is a classic well-meaning experiment that is bound to fail in the end; started with good intentions, but with the consequences poorly thought out, meaning that the Path has to be protected, and the public mustn’t know what’s happening either and the management thus become the enemy.  

I found it an intelligent futuristic thriller, and I’m glad that, as the vogue for paranormal romance is beginning to wane, books such as this are appearing. Although the lead character is female, with its technological base, I hope it will appeal to male readers too. (9/10)

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Source: Review copy from publisher – Thank you. To explore further on Amazon UK, please click below:
Stray by Monica Hesse. Published Jun 2013 by Hot Key Books, paperback, 342 pages. 12+