GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK Nothing to lose. Everything to gain. Winner takes all. “Every bit as addictive as your favorite guilty pleasure binge-watch, but with all the substance of a literary classic.”—Oprah Daily “It’s fun to watch hot people do psychotic things in this novel. . . . Smart and provocative [and] so damn addictive.”—The New York Times Book Review ONE THE BOOKS OF THE SUMMER: The New York Times, Vulture, Time, Harper’s Bazaar, Good Housekeeping, Forbes, Betches, Publishers Weekly Lily—a bored, beautiful twenty-something—wakes up on a remote desert compound, alongside nineteen other contestants competing on a massively popular reality show. To win, she must outlast her housemates to stay in the Compound the longest, while competing in challenges for luxury rewards like champagne and lipstick, plus communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door. Cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave: why would she, when the world outside is falling apart? As the competition intensifies, intimacy between the players deepens, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between desire and desperation. When the unseen producers raise the stakes, forcing contestants into upsetting, even dangerous situations, the line between playing the game and surviving it begins to blur. If Lily makes it to the end, she’ll receive prizes beyond her wildest dreams—but what will she have to do to win? Addictive and prescient, The Compound is an explosive debut from a major new voice in fiction and will linger in your mind long after the game ends.

Everyone ranked The Compound average to pretty good -- there were no strong lovers or haters for this one. The general sense was that Rawle did a quite good job with a couple of things and a competent job of the rest, with one notable exception. Where The Compound was powerful was in its depiction of the interior world of a Love Island style reality show. Rawle makes a great choice in focusing on a single contestant, Lily, and remain in her interiority the entire book, and then show really laudable restraint in holding to only that perspective and knowledge. That choice when paired with a terrific plot device of Personal Tasks the contestants are secretly asked to perform sets up an amazing model of the emotional reality of these shows -- namely that no one knows anything about anyone and no relationship can be trusted to be real. This coupled with copious use of pointless material prizes allows Rawle to show a dark performance of capitalism throughout the book. All of this is strong and we all felt Rawle showed us a true thing about this very false media. But Rawle's worldbuilding was very thin and unreal -- she didn't seem to have much sense of how the desert worked and there is a complete absence of any sense of a consistent world outside of the compound. Some NUBClubbers didn't mind this, seeing the book as a commentary on social media living that is ignorant of anything outside itself, but others thought this was an unforgivable mistake given that we only thought about the outside world because Rawle mentioned the wars and fires and animals. Many of us also thought Rawle made some plotting mistakes. The mystery of what happened to the men when they were coming to the compound was really built up but then deflated in a disappointing resolution that just seemed like a wasted opportunity. The much-promised punishments that the producers delivered to the contestants were nonsensical and just kind of dumb. But none of that could fully take away from how well Rawle created such interestingly strange relationships between Lily and her lovers, friends, and rivals on the show. As a depiction of the vapid relationships on Love Island, it's amazing. So we're torn on how to recommend this book. It's not perfect, but it does a couple of things really well. If you like reality television, it's worth checking out, but just know it's not all perfect viewing.