Conform

**Author:** Ariel Sullivan

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** A woman raised to believe she is defective discovers the city that condemned her was built on lies. Her journey through love, betrayal, and rebellion asks what happens when the powerless finally refuse to conform.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who love dystopian romance with genuine moral complexity, stories where every character has secrets, and endings that leave you desperate for the next installment.

Emeline has spent her entire life underground, alone in a windowless room filled with art she is ordered to destroy. She is twenty-seven years old, born with one blue eye and one brown, a genetic flaw that cost her everything: her Elite family, her place in the clouds, her future. For ten years she has worked in the Archives beneath the city, deleting paintings and sculptures and music that the Illum, the ruling body that controls every aspect of life, has deemed unworthy of existence. She has never questioned her work. She has never questioned the caste system that branded her a Minor Defect. She has never questioned the chip embedded in her wrist that tracks her every movement, her every heartbeat, her every thought. Then a stranger appears in her doorway wearing the dark blue of a Major Defect, the lowest caste, the people rumored to be violent and subhuman. He asks about the art she is deleting. He looks at her mismatched eyes and calls them striking. He leaves, and Emeline realizes that for the first time in a decade, someone has seen her as a person rather than a defect. *Conform* is a dystopian novel, but its heart is not in world-building or political theory. Its heart is in the choices Emeline makes once she begins to understand that her world is a machine designed to crush her. The novel asks what happens when someone who has been told her entire life that she is worthless begins to suspect the people who told her so are lying. It asks whether love can survive when it is built on manipulation, whether trust can exist in a surveillance state, and whether rebellion is possible when every act of defiance has already been anticipated. The tone is intimate and claustrophobic, even when the action moves to the glittering ballrooms above the clouds. Sullivan writes with a close third-person perspective that keeps readers inside Emeline's head as she navigates a world where every kindness might be a trap and every cruelty might be a test. The romance is central, but it is never simple. Both of the men who enter Emeline's life have secrets, and both of them use her in ways she does…