Theater State

“Even though the principal in Boettcher’s Theater-State has a white tiger slumbering in his office, the school that Janus and Katydid and Cassie attend, with Ms. Denton, TX as their teacher, is all too familiar—terrifyingly familiar. The mind-bending cross over between the world of statecraft and a private science academy becomes all too real for Janus . . . when it is revealed that it is drivers that shape the roads and not the other way around. . . . and when the general paranoid lyricism of Boettcher’s odd and compelling novel, like the Mayan ceremonial white roads, leads you not necessarily to a destination but on a journey. It’s an amazing journey. I don’t think you have any choice but to take it.” —Matthew Rohrer