You may not have noticed this, but I like reading bad books. When a novel lets me down, my immediate reaction isn’t to cast its author out of my Kindle wishlist for all time; it’s to take a keen interest in whatever they write next.

I am quite happy to announce I am part of the Blogger Takeover for Q by Christina Dalcher. Many thanks to Izzy and the HQ Team, for sending me an ARC copy of this book! Elena Fairchild is a popular and well-liked teacher at one of the more elite schools. She is married to Malcolm who is a member of the government department responsible for setting up and monitoring these rules and implementing them. They have two daughters, Anne who excels at everything, and Freddie who is nine and in today’s society would probably be on the Autism Spectrum. Her grades are not so good. At first, when they were at college together, Elena and Malcolm used a similar sort of scoring system to decide who they wanted to mix with and who, they hoped in later life, would struggle. As you can tell, they were not sporty or popular and it became a way of protecting themselves against the bullies and the popular kids. They saw themselves as superior, as people who were more likely to succeed in the world. At the time they thought it would be a wonderful way for the country to run, but little did they know it would become the thing that would ruin them. It doesn’t help that her husband is one of the creators of Q and this school system, their relationship is broken and the interaction between them is a joy ( as its so awful ) With schools encountering added challenges and budget constraints how do you educate children with so many individual circumstances and learning abilities? How does everyone receive the best schooling possible?

But few years ago she made two terrible mistake. For getting approval of her mean girls’ club she harassed a loner girl in her high school who ended her life and the other mistake was she chose to marry with a wrong guy who became a predator to serve the system for creating True Aryan Genesis. Malcolm Fairchild , has a respectable position in the government and works on genocide project to form an unique populated society consisted of white, rich, intelligent, chosen American people. ( Oh Malcolm, I haven’t read about a pure evil since I read true crime books about Manson family so you over exceeded my expectations! I don’t know how many times I screamed “Burn in hell” when I’m reading your parts! By the way, why do you carry similar name with Morgan Fairchild- a.k.a Chandler Bing’s mother- I love the author’s quirky and dark sense of humor!) Elena’s life is in turmoil as she faces the prognosis of her younger child after she falls into the third tier. What can she do?

Saying the lead character is incredible isn’t enough. Not just because you can really connect with her during her life, her good memories, and her mistakes; what Elena does is going to save the world - or at least the United States.

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So…how would you feel about living in a world where everyone is perfect? And I do mean everyone! You will be defined and judged purely by your Q score. The origins of the Q system (which the book spells out with chunks of thudding exposition, because like most American political writing this book has zero subtlety) lie in the searing hot-button topic of...the public education system, something that Americans are famously passionate about. We’re told that all classes of society--the conservative rural poors, the “champagne communists” (whatever those are) of the big-city penthouses, and the normal people who live in suburbs--rose up with one voice to demand that the government enact the Fitter Family Campaign’s sweeping reforms, such was the public furore over public school performance. When the villains want to push a new aspect of their agenda, like making the state schools boarding institutions or moving them far out into the boonies so the kids will never see their families again, all they need to do is invoke the dread spectre of classroom overcrowding and all dissent immediately vanishes. A shameful and part of America's history rears its ugly head and is taken to extremes. Although this is not something I learned from history textbooks, I have read many books about this since I was out of school. It is the best future and now everything is monitored by Q scores. Scores which measure ones IQ, but also includes other socioeconomic indicators, family members performance, and the positions they hold in the work force.

This is what Elena Fairchild believes. As a teacher in one of the government’s elite schools for children with high ‘Q’ scores, she witnesses the advantages first-hand. It features the same bland, first person POV, from a mother of a nuclear family. Highly educated and very middle class. No deviation at all, to the point that they could have been the same character. Even though fiction, Q still touches home, and that it why I love this book. Because it’s as real as it is fictional.It is truly crushing when a book you have anticipated ends up being a disappointment. I really enjoyed Vox, the previous release from this author and I liked her brand of contemporary dystopia; close to current society. Our protagonists also both have a child who is indoctrinated by the new system(s), who both end up realising that oppression is bad! Aren't they smart? Steven and Anne play exactly the same roles as far as I could see. My sarcastic tone should indicate how implausible I find all of this, but to be honest the book lost me at the idea that getting sent to a yellow school is basically a permanent separation. The book is trying to portray a situation where the Q system slowly took over society piece by piece, with people accepting each successive step until the major outrages didn’t seem to be too far away from what they had already decided was normal (someone even wheels out that metaphor about the frog getting boiled); this is how real repressive societies often operate, but in this case I think taking people’s children away is far too great an overreach to not be met with at least some resistance. Q started off well, with a family situation, two successful parents and two high-achieving children. However, the mask fell off and a hideous under layer was revealed. This was a story about IQ above every other facet of a person and it drilled down to emotive and polarising topics of elitism, abortion and someone’s personal worth.

This is the second book written by Christina Dalcher. I read her first book, VOX, last year and unfortunately I really didn't enjoy it. My spoiler-filled, and equally loathsome, review for that can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... Instead we again see what a hard time the straight, middle-class, highly educated, white woman (who somehow caused these systems to be rolled out in the first place) had when dealing with the repercussions. Oh my goodness, this book. Even the synopsis wigged me out. In the near future, every child’s potential is measured through a standardized test, referred to as their quotient (Q). If you score well, you attend a top tier school, which means more opportunities. If you don’t meet the cutoff, you are destined for a federal school where the outcomes are fewer and less advantageous. Q is a novel that has made me personally reflect on the way others are viewed. Even if we don’t like to admit it we live in a world with a class system in place, where some races are seen, by some at least, as more important than others and where some lives seem to matter more than others. You have to challenge why we haven’t moved forward in our judgemental thinking. Elena Fairchild is a teacher at one of the state's new elite schools. Her daughters are exactly like her: beautiful, ambitious, and perfect. A good thing, since the recent mandate that's swept the country is all about perfection.Until the day I thought of something like writing in this book: a school where the “nerds” have won and the ones who didn’t care about education are in the last step of the chain. The new educational system (Silver schools for the smartest, Green for the middle and Yellow for the bottom-tier students) has been in place for a while now.