Title: Knight in Paper Armor
Author: Nicholas Conley
Genre: Dystopian, YA Fiction
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

Are you feeling your life is lacking a little social rhetoric? Knight in Paper Armor is what you are looking for to fill that need. I’m just not sure anyone needs this much preaching from an otherwise decent story. Keep in mind this is a dystopian novel set in the future, but it is playing with metaphors of today’s news reports.

Natalia Rodriguez Gonzales is poor and bullied, growing up in a family of undocumented immigrants. Heaven’s Hole has little to offer her, so she gets lost in sketching out her memories and drawing a future she hopes to come.

The author Nicholas Conley makes a lot of tongue in cheek cultural comparisons in Knight in Paper Armor, one of which is Natalia Gonzales being this freedom fighter for Heaven’s Hole. Natalia is a seventeen-year-old girl with an edgy look who, at one point, shaves her head. But it’s more than that she rallies her people with a ‘Never Again’ slogan, and dares to challenge the patriarchy and the great Thorne Century Corporation that has it’s named on everything and owns a little bit of everything.

She could be plucked right out of our current headlines.