Enclave by Anne Aguirre

 It has been, as said in the afterword, over 100 years since some sort of disaster (I won't say what) destroyed modern society.  Deuce lives underground in a rule-oriented and almost Spartan culture, where she achieves her lifelong dream of becoming a huntress who brings food and kills off some of the monsters known as "Freaks".  She is assigned a suicide mission with her partner, Fade, by her mean supervisor, Silk.  It turns out the Freaks are getting smarter and may overwhelm the College Enclave soon, but nobody believes Deuce or Fade when they return with the news.  Deuce steps in to save her friend from a horrible punishment, and both Deuce and Fade...

I'll let you read from there.

Enclave is magnificent, aside from a couple of factual errors.  I had fun reading the whole way through.  Half of it is a rich Dystopia, while the other half is a fun adventure.  Every page brings a new wonder to gape at or mull on.  So if I have two large paragraphs about the flaws, assume that this is only because it is much easier to write about the flaws of a book than the merits of one.  If you read Enclave, it will be one of the best decisions you will make.

The characters all spoke two languages.  One was conveyed by the vocal chords, the other by the eyeballs.  Or so it seemed, with the crazy intuition that everybody had.  At one point, the protagonist is wondering if Silk will think of her a certain way if she does a certain thing.   Fade is apparently able to answer her concern because he is able to read all of that from her face.  Did she give it away by twitching her "Silk muscle" too much?  Not to mention that she intuitively knows that "winter" sounds like a cold word and "soul" just sounds like the words she's heard from somebody dead.  If I used that kind of logic, I could just walk up to anybody and speak English with the assumption that they would have an intuitive knowledge of what the words mean.

One of the things that irked me about the book was how wonderfully fresh all of the canned foods were.  The author included a couple of pages at the end where she cited where she got the idea that canned foods would last hundreds of years.  Here is the website: http://www.internet-grocer.net/how-long.htm  This website is interesting.  It has a few stories of canned food lasting decades or, in three cases, over a century.  I don't think she picked up on the fact that those were extraordinary cases.  The website itself says "Now, we're not saying that our canned meats, canned cheese and canned butter will last 118 years, but we're pretty confident that you can get at least a 15-20 year shelf life out of them, in light of this article. (The manufacturer offers a 3 year guarantee.)  There's a second, similar story--this time American--following this one."  Also of note is how one of those extreme examples was from a sunken ship under thirty feet of silt.  The DSV Alvin was a sunken submersible found with completely unsealed sandwiches aboard after about a year that were still edible, though this may be partially attributed to the depth it was submerged at, which was several times that of the example.  In all of the website's examples, the cans were pretty much kept at the same low temperature the entire time.  In the book, on the other hand, these cans are found in New York houses, schools, and stores that haven't had heating in over a hundred years.  They would not still be edible.  On another, related note, I highly doubt that Stalker would have been able to learn to read as fast as he did.