YOURS FOR THE TAKING

A feminist multibillionaire’s solution to a climate change–induced housing crisis comes with a dark underbelly in this debut novel.

Ava is a white 20-something trying to stay afloat in 2050s New York City. Opportunities—and the island itself—are shrinking, so when applications to the Inside Project go live, both she and her girlfriend jump through all number of hoops to apply. Greenlit by the United World Government and funded in part by the enormously wealthy tech innovator Jacqueline Millender, Inside is supposed to provide state-of-the-art insulated housing for three million people selected by lottery. When Ava alone is chosen to go Inside, she starts on a path that will intersect with two other women—Shelby, Jacqueline’s white, trans assistant, and Olympia, Inside’s Black, queer medical director—and reveal how much the program is shaped by Jacqueline’s personal desires and willful ignorance. Korn’s premise couldn’t be more timely, mining ecological anxieties and the disappointments of girlboss feminism, but the novel’s engaging opening act doesn’t provide enough structural support for the back half. Despite regularly deployed reveals, the novel rarely surprises, seeming more interested in taking Jacqueline to task on the page than making her a compelling villain. Each point-of-view character is allowed serious relationships (romantic, familial, or friendly) with a maximum of three people, which gives a book ostensibly about community a very lonely feeling. While the point of Inside may be its unsustainability, the lack of thought about basic functionality (Olympia realizes, 43 chapters in, that there are no codified rules against romantic relationships between Inside medical staff and residents) becomes an indictment of the author as well as the characters.

Like the woman at its center, this novel sparkles with interesting ideas but struggles to delve deeper.