Waterbound

In a futuristic society sixteen-year-old Gem discovers that a group of handicapped people who call themselves the Waterbound live hidden beneath the City

Some time in the future, people live with limited resources in a City run by the faceless, bureaucratic "Admin." Admin provides everyone with food and medical care, but as Gem discovers soon after she turns 16, it also has a secret: the Waterbound, disabled people exiled from a society where words like "blind" and "wheelchair" have been declared "obsolete" or of "figurative use" only. As Gem learns, the Waterbound have been shunted aside to live under the City, ever since "the Ruling.... Babies like us officially die when they are born," so that the City will not have to support them. Gem's curiosity and idealism push her, with the help of a few friends, to reveal the existence of the Waterbound to the citizens above, in such a way that Admin can not keep it quiet. This would be a more satisfying triumph if Admin were not so easily defeated, and if the story were not played out in a too-familiar setting, a Giver-like place, sketchy and symbolic. It's even populated by stock characters from YA fiction, which, although a bit of a change from the stock characters of science fiction, may not be enough to garner a following for this somewhat didactic first novel. Ages 12-up.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

An earnest, plodding novel of the future, in which a teenager is shocked to discover a community of disabled outcasts living in tunnels below her city. With human society reduced to two closely regulated walled cities, permission is required to go Outside to visit the ``environment.'' When Gem, 16, discovers in the database an old map showing rivers and other points of access underground, her friend Jay admits knowing all about them and takes her down to meet the Waterbound, inhabitants who live in darkness and semidarkness. Blind Mike, deaf Sal, wheelchair-bound Sophie, and others, perhaps a hundred altogether, are dead, according to official records, but were secretly rescued by courageous hospital workers. It turns out that Gem and everyone she knows has a sibling below ground; her previously unsuspected sister, Alice, has gone ``Downstream beyond'' to an unknown fate. Stemp's disabled people display a realistic mix of dispositions, but they're all types--one blind, one legless, one with cerebral palsy--and unlike Gregory Maguire's I Feel Like The Morning Star (1989) or Lois Lowry's The Giver (1993), there are no authority figures to grapple with or moral dilemmas to conquer. The plot, replete with hanging threads, is also practically devoid of danger, suspense, humor, or surprise, nor does the climax, in which the Waterbound suddenly decide to reveal themselves by writing notes on folded paper flowers and floating them downstream, lead to any clear resolution. (Fiction. 11-13) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Gr. 6^-10. Sixteen-year-old Gem discovers an intricately folded paper flower one day, floating in a river Outside--that is, outside the brave new world of her highly controlled City of the future. One has to know just how rigidly administered the City is to appreciate how highly unorthodox it is not only to find such a flower but also, more importantly, to try to figure out where it came from. Finding out, and then dealing with the discovery, becomes the stuff of Waterbound. Gem's friend Jay reluctantly lets her in on the secret of the underground world called Waterbound, a place where less than perfectly formed children, including Jay's brother, J2, have been shut away. Against orders from Admin, the supposedly all-knowing government, a few brave souls have managed to keep the castaways alive, and they, in turn, have developed a community. The power of that community eventually leads them to force a resolution to the monstrous injustice. While Gem and Jay's characterizations never quite convey the force they should, sf fans will enjoy the techno aspects and intriguing plot. Anne O'Malley