While living in the U.S. as a queer person today is, thankfully, far from the dystopian world envisioned in Stephanie Oakes' newest young adult novel, The Meadows, there are some precarious similarities.
Set in a not-too-distant future, climate change has decimated Earth, fracturing society to the extent that the government's been taken over by an oppressive surveillance state called the Quorum. Citizens' actions are recorded by "eyes" and "ears," every past move analyzed and future move predicted by the all-knowing algorithm. Protagonist Eleanor and other youths find hope, however, in dreams of being invited to attend one of the country's most esteemed educational institutions, the Meadows among them.
Yet as readers can predict from the book's onset, something sinister lurks in the shadows of these eerily serene settings.
After arriving at the Meadows — a beautiful yet sterile facility surrounded by fields of ever-blooming, lavender flowers — Eleanor and the other girls begin a multiyear curriculum on "ladylike" skills: painting, needlework, personal hygiene, socialization and comportment. The Meadows' teachers, called matrons, promise the girls bright futures as dutiful wives and mothers. Over time, though, Eleanor and her peers begin to piece together the real reason they're there: The Quorum wants to completely suppress, reprogram and erase their sexual orientation.
Oakes recalls when the seed of The Meadows began to take root in her mind, sometime in 2019. She'd heard a news report about then-Vice President Mike Pence's ties to ultraconservative organizations and hate groups that support conversion therapy.
"I kind of thought that conversion therapy wasn't a thing anymore, and I knew it was banned in Washington," Oakes says. "So it was this subject that I sort of mentally filed away as, we don't have to worry about this anymore. But then I learned that it's actually still very prevalent, and even in Washington, the ban only prohibits licensed mental health therapists from doing conversion therapy, and they were never the people doing it in the first place. [The ban] doesn't do anything to prevent the majority of conversion therapy to happen, which is inside religious institutions or associated with churches. ...Dystopian stories, when they're most effective, are like a mirror to our current society."
She was writing the novel when Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis also began pushing for what's now a state law banning teachers from talking about sexual orientation or gender identity in the classroom. Advocates for LGBTQ+ rights dubbed the bill "Don't Say Gay."
Oakes, who is queer, intentionally didn't include any words used to identify gender or sexuality in the novel as a direct nod to real-world queer erasures. The Meadows' matrons only allude to queerness as a "violation of nature" because the Quorum blames all noncisgender, nonhetero people for causing the world's climate disaster.
"Taking away the word, taking away the ability to even name queer people, that's so insidious and that is here," Oakes says. "So I thought, 'What would that actually look like?' taking it all the way to the extreme of these kids growing up in a world where they don't even know the word gay. In itself, that is a form of abuse — taking away people's terms for themselves."
The Meadows clearly examines some pretty heavy subject matter, but does so realistically and respectfully under Oakes' deft hand. Weaving together moments from Eleanor's past and present, starting when she leaves her rural coastal home to attend the Meadows, the novel takes a page-turning pace toward its climax and conclusion. In the present setting, Eleanor works for the Quorum as an adjudicator, a job checking in on "reformed" girls from the Meadows and other facilities to see if their conversion has "stuck" after being placed in state-arranged, male-female marriages. She fabricates her reports to protect them.
Unlike the headstrong heroes in much of young adult dystopian literature, Oakes crafted Eleanor as more of a simmering rebel — she wavers between seeking acceptance from and wanting to destroy her oppressors.
"I wanted to have a main character who sort of wrestles with how do you stand up when that's not necessarily the natural way you would go about it," Oakes says, adding that some of Eleanor's personality traits were inspired by her spouse, Jerilynn, while Eleanor's tenacious best friend, Sheila, is a little more like Oakes.
While parts of The Meadows' were inspired by Oakes', her spouse's and their friends' firsthand experiences, the story's cast represents the broader queer spectrum while also being racially diverse.
"Any accurate depiction of a queer story has all of the different varieties of expression and self-doubt and different things that we wrestle with," she says. "I didn't come out until I was an adult, and so even just imagining what it would be like as a teen to be dealing with all of this was a mental exercise."
One of Oakes' greatest strengths as a storyteller is her knack for writing imagery- and emotion-filled descriptions of her character's reactions and internal monologues. Eleanor's longings for acceptance, memories of a lost love and even what she feels during a panic attack are visceral and vivid. Readers can feel this pain as deeply as she does.
In the beginning of The Meadows, Oakes describes how Eleanor finds a human anatomy book and studies pages on facial muscle structure so she can mask all her emotions from the ever-watching Quorum.
"But also that can be a queer experience — I have to present the world one thing, but on the inside I'm something completely different," she says. "Even if you take away the dystopian setting, a lot of queer people get really good at having the front-facing version of yourself and the inside version, and they're not often the same."
The Meadows follows Oakes' 2017 Washington State Book Award winner, The Arsonist, and 2015's Morris Award finalist The Sacred Lies of Minnow Bly, the latter of which was adapted into a TV series. To celebrate her latest release, Oakes is featured as part of the Spokesman-Review's Northwest Passages series in conversation with fellow Spokane author Sharma Shields.
Oakes, who's now 36 and until recently worked as a youth librarian, feels privileged to contribute a much-needed entry of queer representation to youth literature, especially as tensions remain high, locally and nationally, over book banning battles in public libraries and schools.
"Six or seven years ago, I was at a meeting of the school librarians in Spokane Public Schools, and I was saying 'We need to be more proactive about buying LGBTQ books, we have these kids in our schools.'" she recalls. "And one librarian said, 'Well we don't have any of those kids at our school.' And I was like, 'Are you serious? Yes, you do.' You think you don't have queer kids at your school so you're not going to buy queer books? It's that kind of thing that scares me because that's so quiet. Nobody's hearing about that on the news." ♦
Stephanie Oakes: The Meadows Book Launch • Tue, Sept. 12 at 7 pm • $7 general, $30 VIP • Spokesman-Review Chronicle Pavilion (7th floor) • 999 W. Riverside Ave. • spokesman.com/northwest-passages
