The Program

The Program is a young adult novel by the American writer Suzanne Young, published in 2013 and the first book of a series.

The book's world is a version of the present where a public health emergency has been answered with surveillance and memory erasure, and the argument is made through the details of ordinary adolescence: what a student can say in a corridor, which friends are being watched, and how quickly a show of feeling can lead to a van being called. Sloane's relationship with James is the part of the story she is determined to keep, and the novel is built as a survival task between the two of them, since the only way to stay together is to keep their grief invisible. Young writes the treatment itself as something that works and is monstrous at the same time, which is what makes the book more than a warning about policy. It began a series of novels set in the same world, with later volumes following other characters through the same programme.