Innovations Academy is an elite, girls-only boarding school. Run almost entirely by men, the school teaches young girls how to be polite, courteous, good homemakers, all with the goal of pleasing the men in their lives. Students never leave campus except for occasional field trips, they have little contact with the outside world (phones and computers are banned), and the school has strict expectations for them in terms of beauty and obedience. But when Mena meets a boy from the outside, she starts to realize that things are far from normal. And as more of the girls begin to wake up, the sisterhood and their desire for justice grows stronger.

I have mixed feelings about this book. If I was just judging it by the last 2/3, my rating would be higher. I knew coming in that this was a feminist dystopian a la Handmaid's Tale. But it takes SO long to finally get to the point where the girls start waking up, the plot twists come in, and things start to shift. I found myself getting angry and frustrated at how blind they were to the injustice of their situation. I think if the waking up had happened earlier, this would be a much stronger book. That being said, once the girls start to grasp that their lives are not "normal", it gets interesting much faster, and becomes a thrilling story of a sisterhood banding together and refusing the let the men in their lives continue to abuse them. And then the plot twists start coming in, which could lead to some great discussions of ethics. It just takes too long to get there.

A few content warnings: there's a ton of blatant misogyny, fat-shaming, physical abuse, sexual harassment. Fear of rape is there although it's never specifically named. Some strong language from specific characters. And a discussion about a magazine article on blow-jobs that gets referred back to a lot.