Minders by Michele Jaffe (review)

Rationality and control have always been Sadie’s hallmark; she follows rules and rejects drama. These qualities, she believes, make her a perfect candidate for the Mind Corps Fellowship, an internship where her body will go into stasis and she will enter the mind of a person in difficult circumstances in order to learn firsthand what such people care about and how they make decisions. Her subject is Ford, a boy from a poverty-stricken family in inner-city Detroit whose brother has been murdered. When Ford was born, his mother allowed Mind Corps to implant a chip in his brain—without his ever knowing—in exchange for health care and financial assistance. Now almost an adult, he’s smart but also highly emotional, a contrast to the logical Sadie; living inside his head awakens feelings that she can’t control, especially when she falls in love with him. When she witnesses Ford commit a murder, though, she knows something has gone desperately wrong, but finding out what it is means breaking a lot of Sadie’s beloved rules. Jaffe’s speculative aesthetics of the way brains process experience at nonverbal levels is as fascinating as the mystery here; Sadie comes to understand how Ford’s vision dims when he senses deception, how he relates feelings like betrayal and hope to specific smells, and how sexual arousal sets off an entire symphony in his head. As always, Jaffe (author of Bad Kitty, BCCB 4/06, etc.) crafts a high-stakes adventure with impeccable pacing, and she even manages to inject a little comedy into this harrowing crime drama. Her evocative descriptions of the wasteland of inner-city Detroit read like a tragic love story as Ford imagines its renaissance, and while the premise of becoming a research subject in exchange for health care appears exploitative, there is almost an argument for the positive side of Big Brother here. The combination of romance, sci-fi, and crime drama makes for a splendidly well-rounded and engrossing story with broad appeal.