Landry Park by Bethany Hagen

"Two hundred years ago, America found itself at a crossroads.  With sickness and famine came economic turmoil, and with economic turmoil came the looming threat from across the Pacific-China and her allies.  The rich and the poor temporarily forgot their fight with each other and united to defend themselves.  They failed...
In the coming years, Jacob Landry emerged as the voice of reason and stability, promising a new way of life whereby the wealthy could protect their own and gently spur the underclass into productivity....After two years of destructive and bitter warfare, the Uprisen were victorious.  The boundaries of race and gender and religion fell away as class became the most important delineator in society."

This is a story of deceit, power, and war.  Every society has to ask themselves, who will be the first to fall, most especially with nuclear power at hand.  Jacob Landry took nuclear power and created an "efficient" resource for power; however, he turned to the lower classes to be the one to handle this new resource.  Not only did he segregate the haves and have nots, he also began to weed out those that will not survive to be fit.  He placed a group of people to die, because their lives made the wealthy and elite people's life easier.  Jacob Landry is the vision of one future possibility.

Madeline has always been a Landry, and has always had everything in the world.  This is not the story of her debut into a world of wealth and splendor, this is a story of her debut into reality.  She will finally see what her society is really like, what the Rootless are like, and who the monsters behind everything really are.  With the help of her friends, and of new acquaintances Madeline will grow into to the woman that could never abandon Landry Park, but she will also grow into the woman that cannot imagine running it as well.  Such a lush, posh, gritty, and intense novel, it will have you guessing until the very end... even if you did not really know their was a mystery afoot. 

3.5 stars out of 5!  Thanks Edelweiss.