Description
Life is good in Prospera, a charmed country where the weather is always perfect and no one wants for anything. Old age, sickness, and despair are all unheard of in Prospera thanks to the Nursery, where citizens are “retired” when their easy lives are finished in order to be reborn into a new “iteration.” Proctor Bennett, the ferryman who transports retirees to the Nursery, has never had reason to question the values or origins of Prospera, not until strange things begin happening in his life. When he is charged with ferrying his own father to the Nursery, his father offers cryptic last words that Proctor can’t ignore. For the first time, he glimpses the possibility that all is not as it seems.
Proctor’s journey through the looking glass, so to speak, is both exciting and confounding, as the lines blur frequently between dreaming and waking, illusion and reality, friend and enemy. Characters wake in new environments; they speak to one another in coded, loaded language; no one acts as they did five pages ago. The premise of The Ferryman is gripping, but readers may feel a bit of whiplash when they realize that they—along with the people of Prospera—have been misled all along.