Students who are expelled are unable to survive in this Educator-controlled society and often fall off of the social grid all together. However, some of these students have banded together to form the Truancy - an underground resistance movement whose goal is not to reform the educational system, but to destroy it altogether. The leader of the Truancy, Zyid, believes that only violence and bloodshed will topple the Mayor’s rule.

Tack is a miserable young victim of the school system. During a hazing / bullying incident he escapes into what he believes to be an abandoned and forbidden district only to discover a young mentor who challenges both his intellect and his physical prowess. Tack is being trained to resist the system from within. However, when Tack’s beloved sister, Suzie, becomes "collateral damage" in a Truancy "action," Tack decides to join the group only to destroy them from within. He soon finds himself drawn into escalating violence against the Educators and forms closer ties to individual members of the Truancy. Will he follow the teaching of his beloved mentor who taught against violence, or succumb to the brutal tactics of the Truancy? Will destroying the leader of the Truancy avenge his sister’s death or will it destroy Tack in the process?

In a modern-day tale of "Big Brother," author Isamu Fukui, himself a seventeen-year-old student, takes the reader into an educational system run by the State and designed to produce citizens who are fearful, obedient, docile, and conformist. While the book is a work of fiction set in a futuristic society, it often touches on that which is uncomfortably close to reality. Quite violent, the book is still one which I would recommend for high school students, college students, and their teachers. Though not pedantic in the least, this look into a fictional future through the eyes of a student is one worth viewing - and then talking about.