"The Ersatz Academy" by Andrea Weilgart. The front cover features a dark night sky with stars and a firefly, a school building in the desert, and a bus. The back cover shows the book's title and author name, along with a barcode and ISBN number.

The Ersatz Academy

$15.00

14-year-old Verity Truman has always been a free thinker. But everything changes when a protest gone awry lands her at a military-style reform school. At the Ersatz Academy there is only one way to think, act and speak-and failure to conform has serious consequences. When the Academy’s lessons take a dark turn, Verity and her friends need to find a way out, and fast. But staying ahead of the Academy’s brutal rules and mind control efforts requires an entirely new way of thinking about everything they thought they knew.

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Description

Budding environmental activist, Verity Truman (14), gets sent to a remotely located reform school for accidentally vandalizing the city hall building during a protest. With the goal of inculcating civil obedience and order, the ‘HeadMaster’, along with the other ‘Re-educators’ there are intensively attempting what amounts to brainwashing their young inmates with mind-numbing rules and semantic conditioning through slogans – mediated further by a newly introduced AI system. Verity, along with her younger brother, Silas, have been visited upon by an extraterrestrial emissary – a photosynthesizing firefly-like being who hints at what could become part of a strategy for their survival.