The year is 2066. Rosie Sinclair attends the Forge School, the premier place for creative teenagers to hone their skills and get ahead in subject areas like filmmaking, acting, dancing, and fine art. Graduation from the Forge School is a guaranteed ticket to the good life.

But the Forge School is also a reality television series. All students who attend are on camera for twelve hours of the day. The other twelve hours, they’re put into a drugged sleep, a sleep they’re told will enhance their creativity. As any reader of dystopias (and this is a sort of micro-dystopia, if we consider the school to be its own community) will realize right away, everything is not as it seems at Forge.

Vault of Dreamers opens with Rosie fretting over the “fifty cuts,” the point in the television series (and the school year) at which the fifty students with the lowest “blip rank” (meaning popularity with the viewers at home) will be cut and sent home. Rosie is nearly number 100 (out of only 100 students), and she’s pretty resigned to not making it past the cuts. But it wouldn’t be much of a story if it ended with her going home, so I’ll give a grand non-spoiler and tell you that she makes it.

Rosie is a bit of a rebel, and because she figured she had nothing to lose, she decided to forgo her sleeping pill one night before the fifty cuts. She pretends to swallow it, then sneaks out of her sleeping pod and goes up to the roof, just for kicks. She also sees one of the doctors putting an IV in the arm of a sleeping classmate, which alarms her. Sneaking out one night is a relatively small act of rebellion, but it kicks off a series of similar acts. She starts skipping her pill more frequently, meeting up with a non-student who works in the cafeteria, and planting her own cameras around the school to determine what exactly is going on at Forge – because she knows the school administrators are not simply encouraging creativity in the students by making them sleep 12 hours at night.

This is an odd duck of a book. The premise is actually quite creative, particularly when the sci-fi reason behind the existence of the school and its enforced sleep is fully discovered (the title is kind of a spoiler, but it’s fairly complex, so there’s lots to puzzle out even if you already know it involves dreaming). At the same time, its creativity hampers it a bit. Because the explanation is strange, it’s harder for the reader to grasp, and I left the book feeling a bit confused still. The last pages – and I do mean the very last ones – take the book to a new realm entirely, and that’s where it finally lost me. I don’t need my endings tied up with a neat bow (nor do I need them to be happy, which this one isn’t), but I do think it’s important that the reader is not left saying “huh?” after she turns the final page.

2066 is probably still considered the near future, at least in terms of SF writing, but it’s far enough in the future that the references to Youtube and Facebook sprinkled throughout the book are jarring. They seem very out of place mixed in with references to new and unusual technology we’ve never heard of, and I think teens will rightly question O’Brien’s assumption that such things will still be around 50 years from now. Won’t they be replaced by something newer and shinier? How long did MySpace’s popularity last?

Those were my two biggest hangups with the book, one pretty major and the other relatively minor. There’s a lot this book does right. Rosie’s voice is done very well; she sounds like a teen, not like a world-weary adult (a lot of teens in futuristic sci-fi seem middle-aged cynical to me). This doesn’t mean she’s bright-eyed and bushy-tailed all the time, it just means she sounds her age: young. She’s naive, and even when it’s clear that the adults aren’t looking out for her best interests, she clings to the idea that they are still the ones to be trusted. It’s heartbreaking.

The fact that the school is also a reality series is an intriguing twist. There’s an explanation given for it partway through – at least an explanation for the public, not necessarily the real reason. The concept is relevant for today’s teens and explored fairly well. The students are encouraged to speak directly to the camera, and viewers at home can pull up their favorite students’ feeds whenever they like (there’s not a single camera creating a single story; each student can help shape their own story). Students use the cameras to their advantage in various ways, particularly as the fifty cuts approach, to gain popularity with viewers, which is also directly to “banner ads” that make them money they can cash upon graduation. There’s also the claustrophobic feel the cameras create: Rosie is sure she’s always being watched, but she can’t let that stop her from her quest. It just means she has to get more creative with it.

This is a thrilling read, fast-paced, with a lot of secrets for our protagonist to unearth. There’s a small dash of romance and a couple of subplots (a strange fight with a friend, Rosie’s rough home life) that add layers. The unsuccessful ending notwithstanding, this is a worthwhile read for fans of near-future SF and would make a good readalike for Lauren Miller’s Free to Fall or Rae Mariz’s The Unidentified, both also tech-heavy books set in highly-monitored schools where the adults turn the students into consumable products.

Review copy received from the publisher. The Vault of Dreamers will be published September 16.