re: What are you reading?

ETA: I should know this for how long I've been on this site, but I don't post pics often. Why is mine obnoxiously large compared to everyone else's? TIA

Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami.

The Billion Dollar Spy.

Listed imagines a Louisiana where children can be entered into a market before they are born, their futures priced, traded, and later harvested through dividend claims on their adult earnings. The novel follows Solomon and Leah, two listed children whose lives are shaped by share prices, compliance reports, family sacrifice, and the strange intimacy of being loved through a system that also exploits them. Told through the voice of Eve, their daughter, the story becomes more than a critique of financialized childhood; it is a generational reckoning with the compromises parents make when the world turns love into math.

Leger doesn't lean on spectacle, even though the premise could easily support it. Instead, he builds the horror through kitchen tables, cold coffee, school records, pay stubs, and the small humiliations of being assessed. Solomon’s childhood feels polished into performance, while Leah’s feels like a long act of refusal against a number that never understood her. I found the contrast between investor language and parental memory especially sharp: the market sees milestones, but the families remember cake, red beans, fly balls, illness, silence, and the ache behind every “opportunity.”

I also admired the novel’s patience. It resists turning any parent into a simple villain, which makes the book more troubling and more humane. Gerald, Pete, Valerie, Carolyn, Solomon, and Leah all participate in the system in different ways, but the novel keeps asking whether participation is the same as consent when the alternative is scarcity. That moral ambiguity gives the story its bite. The final part, when the promise not to list a child begins to buckle under the pressure of real expenses and inherited logic, felt inevitable in the saddest possible way. The book understands that systems endure not because people fail to love their children, but because love itself can be conscripted.

Readers who enjoy dystopian family drama, science fiction, social satire, and morally complex near-future novels will find Listed especially compelling. It would appeal to book clubs and readers drawn to stories about class, parenting, capitalism, medical and educational ambition, and the cost of being measured too early. In spirit, it sits near Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, not because the plots are alike, but because both novels turn an institutional cruelty into something intimate, tender, and almost unbearable. Listed is a haunting novel about the price of a child, and the immeasurable worth the market can never touch.