I Become Shadow by Joe Shine (review)

Fourteen-year-old Ren thinks that being kidnapped out of her bed in the middle of the night is the worst thing to ever happen to her, but she has no clue just how bad things can get. It turns out that Ren would otherwise have died very soon, and she has therefore been chosen by an organization to begin training as a Shadow, a hyper-trained secret guardian of a person destined to be important sometime in the future. Ren’s subject appears to be a hapless college genius, but there’s much more to him than there seems, and it soon becomes clear that the bad guys after him might actually be the good guys with whom Ren has allied herself. It’s a complex plot, and things move quickly, but sophisticated sci-fi fans will enjoy the layers. Ren’s training, a process that takes years and which very few of her peers survive (one aspect involves injecting agonizing fluid every night with the end result being a pain-free existence if you can stay sane for the years it takes to kick in), is squirm-worthily horrendous, but it is all effectively described and logical within the context, and Ren, as narrator, chooses to gloss over much of the worst she endures. Shine elegantly traces the development of the world, explaining how a culture that is still reeling from one single change (in 1992 a satellite built to take high-res pictures of Earth instead sent pictures from 2042) could end up so disturbing under the placid surface.