Red Side Story

Chromatacia is a society sorted by how much color each person can see. Eddie Russett, a twenty-year-old Red, is about to stand trial for a murder he did not commit. Conviction would mean a one-way trip to the Green Room, where execution is carried out by exposure to color until the victim falls asleep.

Eddie is also in a forbidden relationship with his co-defendant, Jane Grey, a Green whom the book portrays as charismatic and unpredictable. The Rules of their world leave little room to move, and the two look for a loophole in them.

Civilization here was rebuilt five hundred years after an event nobody names, "Something that Happened". The shadowy National Color, based in distant Emerald City, governs a population watched closely at every turn. Somewhere in that system lies a truth that has been kept from the people living under it.

This is the follow-up to Shades of Grey. The tone is comic and darkly satirical, a dystopian adventure in which two lovers try to stay alive, even if that means overturning the order that rules them.