Wrecked by Katie Mitchelson

 

Desperate to escape terrible home lives, teenagers Jake and Minnie agree to be participants in the trial of a new technology that is designed to help young people deal with trauma. Their lives begin to spiral out of control when another member of the trial goes missing.

I picked up Wrecked by Katie Mitchelson as she is a local author. I don't read much YA fiction, but I do enjoy novels that are slightly dystopian; just different enough to make things unsettling, but not too different that they are implausible. Wrecked certainly fit the bill. Young people are offered the chance to have a microchip implanted in their brain which will record their thoughts. These thoughts can then be shared with a therapist to help the young person deal with the trauma they have suffered. The young person is assured that they are completely in control of what they share.

Both Jake and Minnie have chaotic backgrounds. Jake's stepfather is abusive, and his mother is too frightened to stand up to him. All Jake wants to do is find somewhere he can live with his mother and young sister, well away from the abuse. After her mother died, Minnie ended up in the care system, separated from her siblings. Her recent foster placement has fallen through as the foster carer was apathetic towards Minnie; the only thing she was interested in was the financial reward.

Spectrotext, the company behind the implant, runs The Hive, an accommodation unit for the young people taking part in the trial. From this base, both young people become involved in the world of drugs thanks to a local drug dealer. It was frightening how quickly and easily both Jake and Minnie were drawn into this world. The chance of easy money, the promise of much more to come, and peer pressure all work their magic on two susceptible individuals. Danger is never far away, and the pair are drawn deeper into this nefarious world when a friend goes missing. I was shocked at how casually life is treated.

As Jake and Minnie search for their friend, they have to consider how much of their thoughts are being recorded. I would have liked to see the technology side of the story play a bigger part than it actually did. By the end, however, you are considering who is more morally bankrupt: the drug dealers who are open and honest about the products they supply, or the technology companies secretly monitoring your every thought and action?

Author Details

Katie Mitchelson has worked as a youth worker in the North-east. Her work with young people inspired a lot of her writing during her creative writing PhD, compelling her to write about teenagers who do not realise that they are victims, who do not realise that they are being groomed for criminality, and the wider problems of country lines.

Making sense of existence is the undercurrent of Katie's writing, as she seeks to unravel the complexities of inequality and raise awareness of important issues in the hope of inspiring important social reforms. Child criminal exploitation is just one of the sociological injustices Katie hopes to explore.