
Literary Fiction · Science Fiction
When She Woke
Mood
Dark, Tense
Parental Rating
R
In a near-future United States where a sexually transmitted plague and plummeting birth rates have fused church and state, criminals are no longer imprisoned but "chromed," their skin dyed a color matched to their crime and broadcast for all to see. Hannah Payne wakes from the procedure dyed red, the mark of a murderer, after she has an abortion and refuses to name the father, a celebrated televangelist she loves. Cast out by her devout family and hunted as a visible criminal, Hannah is forced into a halfway house and then onto the run, falling in with an underground network of women working against the regime as she reckons with faith, desire, and the body the state has claimed the right to punish.