purpngold

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.

It cost $300 to have an actuary determine the lump sum cost to purchase 4 years towards retirement credit. Is there a rough idea on how to calculate that sum before paying the actuarial fee?

After researching a few sites, I’m still a bit confused. It appears that we can withdraw with no penalty our contributions if IRA was established more than 5 years ago (they were). However, earnings will be taxed.

Problem is that we’ve moved accounts a few times over the past 20+ years. Not sure what all in the current balance is from contributions vs. earnings. Can’t access old/closed accounts to see the data and paper was lost between Hurricane Rita and house movings.

Suggestions?

1987 all over again...

Nope!

Called her bar shite crazy.

I belong to a board of directors of a non-profit org. All of the board members recently received an anonymous email that was threatening in nature. Any relatively inexpensive methods of identifying either who owns the email address or at least from where it originated?

Tony Lee Auto
11144 Cedar Park Ave.

I live in LC and have sent my kids who go to LSU to them over the past few years. Honest and do great work.

Steam Whistle Brewery. Son and I had a couple beers there before a Blue Jays game. Unique venue.

Good friend in his early 60s just discovered he has stomach cancer. He's in a hospital in Ohio (I'm in La.) trying to gain strength (rapidly lost 40 lbs) to start chemo. Any recommendations of what to send to him and/or his wife while in the hospital? Expecting smartass/funny responses, hoping for at least a few sound suggestions.

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Have to wear one for our Dixie Youth All Stars each year because the kids love them.

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Who’s in charge? The yutes need guidance and to be taught how to be men. Man up, dammit and show em how to wear a ball cap the only right way there is to wear one.

NYTimes story on Teacher Unions after Janus