Ask the Passengers

Tess is a teenage girl who has worked as a sex worker. A man with a dark past of his own travels beside her. Circumstances throw the two together on a train ride to a remote town.

The story alternates between their first-person voices. Each narrator tells it in fragments, and neither can be fully trusted, so the reader pieces together what happened to them from partial accounts.

Tess has been exploited and abused. The man has been a victim himself, and that history complicates how far anyone can judge him. Neither is simply good or simply bad. The book is a gritty, morally ambiguous coming-of-age story that deals with trafficking and abuse.

Tension and darkness run through the pages, though hope and reflection come in as both characters face their pasts. Character drives the book rather than plot, and it has no romance or revenge storyline. What matters is whether either of them can find a way to redemption by the time the train reaches its stop.