Middlebook

by Joe Ponepinto

In 2051, America has fallen under the grip of an ultra-conservative regime that raises every child in state-run schools, severing them from parents, technology, and the “contaminated” past. Most students obey. Cerane Winterlea does not.

Middlebook follows thirteen-year-old Cerane as she risks everything to save Ranson, a boy raised by the fugitive Beacons who resist the government’s control. When Ranson is captured and sent to Cerane’s school, his lack of indoctrination makes him a target for exile to the dreaded asylum—a place from which no child returns. Determined to protect him, Cerane escapes with Ranson and her closest friend, Anna, only to find themselves hunted by the government’s ruthless vigilantes, the Trumen.

Rooted in today’s political anxieties, Middlebook imagines a chillingly plausible near-future America while holding fast to hope and resistance.

242 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 16, 2025

About the author

Joe Ponepinto's novel, Mr. Neutron, was published by 7.13 Books in March, 2018. He was the founding publisher and fiction editor of Tahoma Literary Review, a nationally-recognized literary journal that has had selections reproduced in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, Best Small Fictions, and other notable anthologies. He was the winner of the Tiferet: Literature, Art & the Creative Spirit 2016 fiction contest, and has had stories published in Crab Orchard Review, Fugue, The Lifted Brow, Lumina, 2 Bridges Review, and dozens of other literary journals in the U.S. and abroad. A New Yorker by birth, he has lived in a dozen locations around the country, and now resides in Washington State with his wife, Dona. He is an adjunct writing instructor at Seattle's Hugo House and Tacoma Community College.